AT 1:17 AM : The People We Meet At Parties
The People We Meet at Parties
The People
The girls' bathroom mirror is the noisiest yet quietest place in the building.
A girl leans forward toward the sink, carefully reapplying lip gloss under the fluorescent light. Her eyeliner is heavier than it was earlier in the night. The blazer she wears is covered in graffiti-style scribbles, marker ink crawling across the fabric, making it look deliberate.
In the queue near the entrance, someone adjusts a handmade top decorated with oversized safety pins. By the dryers, another girl stands still, twisting a thin silver ring around her finger, over and over again.
These are not the people on the dance floor. They are everywhere but.
The door swings open again, the bass rushes in, and they all disappear back into the night.
I Wear, Therefore I Am
At around 1:17, something shifts in the air.
At around 1:17, something shifts in the air.
The music gets louder, and the conversations start to feel more honest. People start fixing their makeup, looking into their phone cameras, jackets come off because it’s hot inside, and then they go back on again five minutes later when someone drags them outside for a smoke or for air. People who were strangers all night suddenly start talking like they’ve known each other longer than the party itself.
It’s also the point in the night where you start actually noticing what people are wearing, when you step out of the dark dancing floor and into spaces where everything is finally visible.
Nothing looks fully put together anymore. Pieces clash, slip and overlap. Jewellery layered on top of more jewellery, Makeup that’s a little dramatic, almost theatrical.
When I go up to people, it usually starts simply. A compliment, a question about why they came out tonight.
And it’s in those small conversations that you start to notice that the people who stand out the most at parties are like artists, and instead of putting their ideas on canvases, they wear them, and these spaces become the galleries. The clothes stop being just clothes and start to look more like small pieces of their life, stitched together and worn just for the night.
Fashion, then, becomes an autobiography.
A Black Artistic Lineage of the Unconventional
This idea is not new.
This idea is not new.
In the early 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from New York’s downtown scene, moving between graffiti culture, punk clubs and art studios. His work rejected the polished aesthetics of traditional galleries. Instead, his paintings were chaotic, layered and deliberately unfinished.
Basquiat used scribbled words, crossed-out phrases, crowns and fragmented imagery to build visual narratives that felt raw and immediate, where meaning emerged through accumulation and not refinement. He elevated what many institutions considered messy or absurd.
The crown became a recurring symbol in his paintings, often placed above Black figures to reclaim dignity in spaces that historically denied it.
Forty years later, British-Nigerian artist Olaolu Slawn approaches youth culture with a similar lens. Slawn’s work exaggerates visuals; distorted cartoon faces, stretched limbs, exaggerated teeth and chaotic line work. We can feel the energy spilling out and not being contained.
His paintings look childlike at first glance, but they look like how the youth culture feels.
Loud, overstimulated, hyper-visible.
Both artists understand something fundamental.
Real life and identity are already messy. Because of that, when artists exaggerate or distort things, they sometimes get closer to the emotional truth than a neat, realistic image ever could.
Not by smoothing things out, but by pushing them further, exaggerating what is already there until the feeling behind it becomes
Impossible to ignore.
Distortion becomes a form of honesty.
Profiles From the In-Between Spaces
The Queue Designer
Location: Home Night Club Smoking Area
I was sitting on the floor outside, which was the smoking area. The club door kept opening and closing, music spilling out for a few seconds each time before disappearing again.
That’s when she walked over to me.
“I like your outfit,” she screeched.
Her eyeliner was the first thing I noticed. Thick black kohl all the way around her eyes, still sharp like it hadn’t been there all night.
She sat down next to me without hesitation.
“I’m from Belfast, but I’m half Iranian,” she said when we got deeper into the conversation, adjusting the rings on her finger.
Her outfit was slightly insane. The top was made from two thrifted shirts cut apart and sewn back together. One sleeve sits lower than the other, creating a look under the streetlight.
People kept walking past us, stepping around us like sitting on the pavement outside a club at 3 am was completely normal.
The stitching on her top was intentionally uneven.
“It’s just better when clothes look like you’ve done something to them,” she says, running her hand across the fabric.
And moments like that are exactly what this piece is about. Places where people sit next to each other and start talking like they didn’t just meet five minutes ago, we spoke for another fifteen minutes before she got whisked away by her friends.
The Runaway
Location: The space’s Balcony
I bumped a cig off of her, and we started talking right after.
She moved to the city two months ago, but no one at home knows yet.
“I just wanted to start again somewhere,” she said, lighting a cigarette while leaning against the railing.
Her outfit was simple, but her aura was supermaximum. A black vintage jersey tucked into star-studded leather trousers, the greenest, brightest hair I've ever seen, with layered chains that catch the balcony light whenever she moves.
One thing I remember her saying is “You can talk to anyone at a party, it’s the one place where it’s normal.”
Her lips are red. Liner slightly smudged. Eyebrows bleached. She talked about leaving, and I tried to follow what she was saying, but her words drifted in and out with the music behind us, sentences breaking halfway through, starting again somewhere else.
At one point, she laughs, but it doesn’t quite match what she’s saying.
“I just needed something different,” she says, quieter this time.
The wind catches her hair, lifting it slightly, then someone calls her name from inside, she hurriedly says bye and then she’s gone.
The Bathroom Artist
Location: Club Salvation Girls’ Bathroom
She wore a graphic jumper. The tallest knee-high boots I’d seen all night. Tights ripped wide at the thighs. She had straight Black hair and wore black lipstick.
I’m by the mirror too, waiting for my friend to come out of one of the cubicles. The door behind us keeps opening and closing.
Marker lines are crawling across her sleeves. Words crossed out, written again, layered over each other. Some phrases are half-finished, others overwritten so many times they blur into thick black patches.
I look at her through the mirror.
“I like your jumper,” I said.
She glances at me, then back at herself.
“Thanks, I did it myself,” she says, tugging slightly at the sleeve.
I nod, blending out the edge of my lip with my lip liner.
“What do you do?” I asked
“I draw sometimes,” she laughs
“I used to draw when I was little, so I figured I could make a career out of it”, she continued.
“Then I stopped. I don’t know why.”
Someone squeezes past us to get to the sink, and the tap runs as someone else laughs too loudly in the background.
“But I picked it back up,” she smiles
Around us, people move quickly. In, out. Checking, correcting, leaving.
“I think you look really cool,” I say after a second.
“And I don’t really think that about many people.”
Out there, on the dance floor, none of this would have been visible. It would blur into movement, into light. But in here, everything slows down, and it's just us girls, retouching our makeup, complementing each other.
The Raver from Sheffield
Location: Warehouse smoking area
This wasn’t just one profile; it was a collection of many. People with teletech tattoos, a raver in Leeds who’d come all the way from Sheffield, and others from Glasgow. Most People dressed head-to-toe in dark, grunge layers. There wasn’t just one example of unconventional fashion. Everyone was bringing something cool and different, and I found myself in awe of that.
Nightlife As A Gallery
By this point in the night, it starts to make sense.
These spaces aren’t random. They’re temporary communities.
People who would never meet anywhere else, sitting on pavements, standing in bathroom mirrors, leaning over balconies, talking like they’ve known each other for so long. And that’s why it works. There’s no pressure to be consistent because you might never see each other again.
It makes people more open, more willing to talk, more willing to wear something louder, stranger, more exaggerated than they would in the daytime. The outfits become bolder, the makeup heavier, the choices less controlled. Not because people are trying harder, but because they don’t have to conform.
Slawn exaggerates everything, distorted cartoon faces, bold imagery, loud visuals, and stretched expressions. His work pulls directly from street culture and pushes it further.
At 1:17 am, fashion does the same thing.
Basquiat’s scribbled layers become layered outfits, His crossed-out words become heavy liner and overdrawn lips, makeup that’s been redone, smudged, built up again.
His cultural collage becomes a mixed aesthetic of thrift and designer, thrown together without needing to match, just like the runaway.
Slawn’s exaggerated faces become exaggerated looks. His cartoon distortion becomes makeup that’s pushed too far on purpose. His bold imagery becomes strong jewellery, statement pieces, things that catch your eye.
It’s the same language, just worn instead of painted.
And you see it in the people.
The Queue Designer reconstructs clothes until they don’t belong to anything familiar. Uneven stitching, pieces that shouldn’t work but do, just like Basquiat reconstructs.
The Runaway keeps it simple, but pushes it just enough for it to be interesting.
The Bathroom Artist is the clearest contrast. She looks the most “Slawn-like” visually, bold, distorted and very clearly alternative. But in reality, she’s the softest, the nicest, the one smiling the most.
What looks exaggerated isn’t fake; it’s visible.
Fashion, art, and culture collapse into each other in these spaces. Just like in a gallery, some pieces stand out more. The bold ones, The unconventional ones, The ones that feel a bit too much. And just like art, those are the ones people remember.
At 1:17 am, nightlife becomes a canvas.
And in that moment, when someone is holding a lighter and talking about who they might become, the art isn’t hanging on a wall.
