I’LL BE YOUR BARTENDER: Barflies, Arthur Boyd AW24 Show
It’s a dreary Saturday night in London and I’m early to work. I open the doors using my entire body weight. I’m on my own but know I won’t be for long.
There’s something meditative about setting up the bar, it demands your body, your presence. I take down the bottles from their shelves. I unscrew their lids and drop them into an empty cup. They make a clacking sound when they fall. Unscrew, drop, clack. My mind wanders. Clack, clack. I’m working on a new essay. I’m the bartender who dreams of her big writing break. Clack. But everyone who comes here is just like me. Everyone who comes here has one dream or another, and this place means things to the drifters who haunt it. To some, it’s a sense of belonging, to others a shield against oblivion. To me? It’s also the food on my table. I sigh and unscrew the last cap.
The sound of someone coming in through the door, like the whoosh of a wave at night, breaks me out of my reverie. I look up and see the poet, dressed in her usual uniform: grey double-breasted jacket with one button done, white cotton blouse that spills over the front and wide, comfortable librarian trousers.
The poet, like most poets, is unhappy. She comes in here most nights. Her hair falls in tendrils over her back and her chest and when she drinks, the red of her wine bleeds into the black of her cheeks and she sways like the poet’s symbol incarnate: the inebriate moon. She floats up to the bar and perches on her stool. With a watery smile she asks me for her first glass of wine. Normally, on a good day, she can get through almost an entire bottle. On a bad day, I’ve seen her do worse. She takes out a purple-stained notebook and a pen, and starts to write about her suffering, which is the suffering of all poets: loneliness, the moon, relentless desire. The poet waxes lyrical, wanes in the moonlight. When she sighs before sinking her glass, I can almost hear the sky shift, how the earth turns on its axis. I’ll keep on spinning, it seems to be saying, I’ll keep on spinning no matter what, no matter what you try to do.
I don’t remember the first time I met Arthur Boyd, but I do remember the first moment I started to like him, which comes to be the same thing. We were closing up on a Wednesday night at Reference Point, which invariably means tucking the chess sets away in their drawers and ushering any stragglers out to the sound of Lou Reed’s Goodnight Ladies. Arthur was in good spirits that night. He wanted to linger about, and we let him. He chatted to the other regulars who huddled around the bar. Then, a song came on, Oba, Lá Vem Ela, and he started gliding over the floor, revealing not only his happiness, but that he was a great dancer too. (Dancers, I must confess, earn my trust faster than other people.) I must have started swaying on the spot, spray bottle I was using to wipe down the tables hanging off my arm, when Arthur came up to me and offered me his hand. I decided there and then I could afford to like him.
Arthur is one of the recurring characters who prowl the Reference Point quarters – a library, bookshop, and bar in central London where an array of artists, students and drifters seek refuge on a daily basis. Arthur is a young fashion designer and tailor living in a warehouse, a self-defined “boy who makes clothes”, who glides around the room, even when he’s not dancing.
Photograph by Stanley Blundell
His newest collection Barflies debuted at Reference Point in February. Inspired by the café and bar culture of the 20th century, to which artists flocked to drink and talk and share their art, Arthur turned Reference Point into a symbolic representation of itself, fashioning a bar inside a bar. He brought in a piano and a jazz singer, he dotted the tables with candles and dry flowers, and had the models be in character all night, instead of walking the usual runway. This last part particularly was what gave the show its unique sparkle. Each character-model was assigned to a post and instructed to drink wine, tap away at a typewriter, or look forlornly through the crowd, searching for someone, or something, probably long gone. They were, in fact, the titular barflies. The models, who donned the clothes with an elegance that heralded to a time when cigarettes could be smoked inside, seamlessly embodied the timeless artistic spirit that café culture evokes. It felt like we had time travelled. But, nestled amongst the elegance, I found there was something tenebrous in the room too. The word ‘barfly’ sounds lecherous to me: a head asleep on a bar, whiskey wafting from open pores, a pair of lips attached to a bottle like a mosquito glued to someone’s bloodline. The model-characters were told to keep interactions with the crowd to a minimum. They seemed wistful, nostalgic. There was a whiff of sadness in the air.
On the night of the debut, it seemed like all of London was there. And I was working behind the bar.
The poet turns over a new leaf. And then starts to write on it.
Photograph by Alex Puliatti
The whoosh of a wave again and I look up and see the twins saunter in. Today, they’re dressed in silk and silver, one red one blue, and trailing behind them in a plume of smoke is their habitual group of followers who dog them like shadows. They huddle around a table near the entrance. Someone detaches from the group like a sole atom and zigzags to the bar to order a couple of bottles of wine. I hand them the glasses and the bottles and then watch as they reattach to the hubbub of chat and laughter and sideways glances. Their mouths seem to be all moving at once, their hair, glimmering with gel and pins, is unanimously jet black. (The twins were the first to dye it that colour. The next day their followers hastily followed suit and now they all move in a unified mob of darkness.)
The twins are what gives this place its edge. They draw cigarettes from their purses, and someone leans forward to light them. They set the tone. They exhale in sync and for a second, the fog around them dissipates and they emerge from it like a clap of thunder. The crowd around them buzzes on.
As a bartender my job is to remain empty, like the tumblers and coupes I fill, so drifters can pour in whatever itch they need scratching that day. Friend, flirt, therapist – I’m each, all three, and none at once. I’m always being told who to be. I think the twins too, sip from a similar cup. They too, are lost in a fantasy. Every morning, they touch up their lipstick in front of the mirror and practise their smiles. They build up the courage to emerge into the world, ready to be followed, imitated, pined after, but in their eyes is the indelible trace of fear. Where are we going? They seem to ask. Where are we leading everyone?
I’ve long understood that everyone who comes here is in search of the same thing.
In Madrid, my hometown, Café Gijón was famous in the first half of the 20th century for hosting the literary movement known as ‘Generation of ‘36’, of which poets, novelists and of course the odd bullfighter were part of. La Vía Lactea, in the central neighbourhood of Malasaña, was a hub during ‘La Movida’, the creative and drug-addled post-dictatorship movement of the 1980s. Today, there’s Pub Prada, where I have spent many afternoons playing pool, drinking cheap beer, snacking on nuts, and making an array of friends while sharing cigarettes outside. Time and time again, artists have sought to anchor themselves to a community, searching for a sense of belonging, while also, in a lot of cases, drinking themselves into oblivion. But can these spaces really provide such things? And what are these artists trying so hard to forget?
Patrick Modiano’s 2007 novel In the Café of Lost Youth is set in 1950s Paris, in Café Conde, a fictional café where a group of bohemians, writers making a precarious living and other lost souls meet, to while away the hours and their youths. (Modiano drew inspiration from Guy Debord and the Situationist International, a group of artists and intellectuals who met in cafés and bars after the Second World War.) All the characters who narrate the novel orbit around and speak about the mysterious Jacqueline Delanque, who the Conde regulars rename Louki. A waif-like figure, Louki embodies the ephemeral nature of their time together: nobody knows her past, why she’s there, or where she’s headed. The Conde regulars imbue her with a sense of pathos they seem to be missing in their own lives, musing nostalgically on the afternoons they spent together, almost a decade later. It’s obvious that for them, their shared time at the Conde did little to stall the obliterating force of the passing of time. It seems too, that the characters’ loyalty to the Conde, stemmed from this very knowledge: they knew that their time on earth was transient, ephemeral, a clap of thunder in a plume of smoke.Isn’t the certainty of oblivion enough of a reason to submit to it?
I read it in one sitting at a pub near Reference Point one afternoon after Arthur recommended it to me in light of his show. While I read, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the destiny of all our time spent at Reference Point as well. All those afternoons, in conversation with each other, diluted by the waters of time, leaving nothing but a vague swirl of colour in its wake.
Photograph by Stanley Blundell
Whoosh. Over the heads of the twins and their friends I see the artist come in. Her hair is pinned up like usual and she’s wearing the pin-striped jacket she always wears. Her ears sparkle with an array of jewellery and her skirt is pink and soft, like her. Hers is the corner at one end of the bar, where she sits for hours, hunched over a notepad, sketching, and peering at her surroundings. When the artist takes a break from her drawing, she likes to drink vodka and tell me about her neighbours, which she observes relentlessly, as if witnessing others’ lives can stand in for not living your own. She draws portraits of everyone who comes in, brandishing her pen against our shared mortality. One time, many nights ago, as I served the artist one last drink, she cleared her throat and asked me (or was it to herself?) why she was recording all this. Who will care about us, in ten- or twenty-years’ time? She chugged her drink and slunk back to her corner. I certainly don’t know. I continue to polish the glasses.
Finally, almost imperceptibly, like the sun disappearing on the horizon, the general slips in, wave hushed by the flurry of conversation. He’s dressed in wool. I don’t know much about the general. I don’t think anybody here does. He asks for some wine and nurses it on the couch silently. His face is sallow and contained. Some things are better left unknown.
That’s all of them: the drifters I take care of. I like to think I take care of them, not only with drinks but with comfort as well. Some days I wake up feeling like all I have is what I offer them and what they can offer me. All at once, the room goes quiet and we all share a look. When time erodes what it must erode, and change has taken over our bodies, and our spaces, and when the dust has settled over everything that used to be ours, nobody can say that we didn’t share our common burden.
Arthur tells me that he started to come to Reference Point two years ago, when he was living in Oxfordshire. At the time, he came to London once or twice a week, to go to shows, events or any fashion internships he’d scored. When friends’ houses and couches started to wear from his use, he found that Reference Point quickly became a “home away from home”, a place where he could rest, quite literally on the blue sofas, but also a space where he could talk about his work among peers and people who treated him like an equal. People who challenged him. Arthur tells me Reference Point was a place where he felt he truly belonged, or at the very least, somewhere he felt he wanted to belong.
I started working at Reference Point in the spring of 2023. If there’s one thing I’ve done during my time here, it’s witness innumerable interactions between people. A lot of the time, I’m struck by their earnestness. Because sometimes, like Cinderella at midnight, when we close at 11pm, new-made friends go back to being strangers. They say goodbye and walk away from each other, never to cross paths again. Other times, of course, I’ve seen the inception of paths destined to run in parallel for a while. Yet what remains true is that people return to Ref again and again in search of these experiences, in search of each other, in search of a crossing. People, like Arthur, search for places to belong to because they know that the only shield we have against time and oblivion is each other after all.
In the Café of Lost Youth opens with the following quote from Guy Debord:
“Halfway along the path of real life,
We were encircled by a dark melancholy,
Expressed by so many sad and mocking words,
In the café of lost youth.”
Arthur Boyd’s collection Barflies is an ode to the drifter spirit, an ode to dreamers and an ode to sad sorts looking for connection.
And, in your search, for now, I’ll be your bartender.
Arthur Boyd is a fashion designer and tailor. At 19 years old, he has presented capsule collections during London Fashion Week in 2023 & 2024. Favouring neo-classical menswear and androgynous womenswear, Boyd makes a name for himself through exploring new ways to make classically beautiful garments.
Arcadia Molinas is a writer, translator and the online editor of Worms. Her writing has appeared on Write or Die, Coveteur, motor & elsewhere. She has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.
