William flew in from Val Thorens to be here tonight. He interrupted his skiing holiday — interrupted, rather than cut short, because he’s flying back to the slopes tomorrow morning — to be here, at Chelsea Life Jacket’s Christmas party, in a hired room at an upmarket bar off the King’s Road.
Chelsea Life Jacket is an events and clothing company started in 2021 by a man called Archie Scott Brown. It’s named after the slang for a sleeveless gilet (particularly from the countryside-coded clothing brand Schöffel) associated with the posh, Sloaney types who haunt west London. And boy, does the brand lean in. Its logo incorporates two guns and a game bird. Its promotional videos, filled with guys built for the rugby pitch and girls built for Tatler, are a kaleidoscope of clichés: guns over shoulders, Range Rovers, champagne, private jets, Burberry scarves.
The company’s 2023 Christmas video, a parody of “Let it Snow”, begins with the lines: “Oh the weather outside is frightful, but our Range Rovers are delightful / We’re all doing so much blow, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”. In a video from a couple months earlier, which occasionally goes viral, a couple of guys in CLJ mohair jumpers (£99.99) walk down the steps of a Georgian townhouse and phone up another pair to ask what they’re up to. “Just been tossing the pill about with Chuggsy a little bit,” comes the reply — “the pill” being a rugby ball. They rendezvous, along with some girls, at Notting Hill Carnival, where they chug champagne as well as Red Stripe. “Juxtaposition,” the Instagram caption reads.
Does William, our skier on break from his holiday, match this vibe? Well, yes. He’s wearing CLJ socks, trousers, a branded quarter-zip fleece and — he pulls open the quarter zip to show me — a branded rugby shirt. This on-brand fit is complemented by a Christmas elf’s hat, below which a wispy mullet droops a few inches over William’s collar, blowing in the wind as we chat in the smoking area.
William is 19, and he works for his dad, who’s a farmer. (“Farmer”, incidentally, is how many landowning aristocrats describe themselves.) He says he’s staying five minutes down the road “in an apartment my dad got for me”, with two friends. They’re “just having a good time in London”, he says, and Chelsea Life Jacket is his idea of a good time. “I like the idea of — I’m gonna sound really, really posh here — this posh, cunty group of people: Schöffels; going out in Chelsea.”
Why am I here, on the last Saturday before Christmas? The occasional virality of CLJ exploits is partially responsible, but so is a man known as the Schooner Scorer. Schooner — a 29-year-old actually called Alex Hendy, as per Companies House — has 255,000 Instagram followers to CLJ’s 57,000. He accumulated them with viral videos in which he “scores schooners” — that is, he downs and rates pints outside pubs.
Typically, he arrives by pulling up on a Lime bike; the lurching camerawork makes you feel like you’ve downed several pints. He’s a tall, good-looking guy with a soft northern accent. In his video thumbnails, he pouts at tilted pints of Guinness like Ben Stiller doing the “blue steel” face in Zoolander.
Schooner’s success has led to boozy excursions on safari in Botswana and, recently, to New York. He has, for a couple of years, been a fixture in CLJ content, but I’m worried his globetrotting means he won’t make an appearance tonight. I check his Instagram stories on the Tube over to the event. Guinness at the Devonshire last night; Park Run this morning. Good omens.
The party is, strictly speaking, a pre-party for a club night at nearby B London; my £17.60 ticket grants access for both. At quarter past eight, the smallish room is still relatively empty. Punters cling to the bar or tables positioned around the edges. The theme is “Christmas movie characters”, and though there are a couple of decent efforts — a nutcracker; an angel — a lot of people are in suits, black tie and party dresses, accessorised with Santa hats. (I’m dressed as Patrick Bateman — grey suit, pink striped shirt, blue Hugo Boss tie — because American Psycho has a Christmas party scene, which is good enough for me.)
While I’m in the loo, I overhear a group of guys remarking that one of their number “only watches the news when a royal dies”. A 23-year-old girl I speak to, who doesn’t give her name, works as an estate agent and lives a three-minute walk away. She knows a lot of people here, she says, because “Chelsea is kind of small”. Abby, a 19-year-old Oxford Brooke’s student, says “everyone” knows about CLJ. “It’s cool.”
But although the brand bills itself as a “private members club”, any punter can buy tickets — and many have. The crowd, William says, used to mainly come from English boarding schools and rah universities like Exeter and Durham. Now the social mix is broader — less “cunty” and more “chilled out” — which he approves of.
Inside, I run into gilet-clad Charlie, a 21-year-old from Worcestershire who teaches rugby and football. He found out about CLJ through Instagram, and has booked a hotel room in Clapham especially for the night. He’s here with Sachit, a 23-year-old medical student at Imperial who lives in Kensington and sees CLJ as the “perfect stepping stone” to network with well-connected people.
A 26-year-old from Hendon who doesn’t give his name says he heard about CLJ through friends, and that it’s a cheaper night out than Inferno’s, the Clapham nightclub beloved by the Russell Group graduates (and Aussies) who live in the surrounding postcodes. He’s not particularly posh himself, but is unbothered by CLJ’s reputation. “As long as you’re not pretending [to be] something you’re not,” he says, “what’s the fucking harm?”
Everyone else has good things to say, too. People talk about how friendly the event is — “it feels like a family”, says Luke, an 18-year-old from near Crawley with big diamond studs in his ears. When I bring up the “Chuggsy” video with William, he says that people from all social circles are welcomed. “We’re not posh wankers,” he says. “We’re just people that want to go on a night out.”
The party’s vibe — which gets vibe-ier as the room fills up and the DJ gives way to a guy doing jazzy covers of “Espresso” and “Last Christmas” on a keyboard — is unmistakably quite posh, but in a weirdly non-threatening way. These are, it feels like, the slightly bumbling cousins of the people who actually run the country. To paraphrase Lil Wayne, real elites move in silence. They might exploit their upbringing by becoming bankers, or lawyers, or fixers for the global super-rich who’ve engorged London, but it’s all cloaked in a faux corporate meritocracy. CLJ, like the public schoolboy who goes to Oxford Brookes rather than Oxford, has to trade on privilege a little more directly. Those who loudly flex their signet ring and their country house usually do so out of anxiety — an anxiety that, while they’re popping champagne corks, real power is quietly getting on with things in the townhouse offices of Mayfair hedge funds.
But if you can’t hack 80 hours a week in front of a Bloomberg terminal, why not leverage your background for online clout? Everyone else is leveraging something — indeed, Lily Phillips, the notorious OnlyFans star, made a brief appearance on the CLJ feed in May. The company’s videos might play up the most irritating Sloane Ranger stereotypes, but if that hate-watch quality makes them go viral, and gets CLJ in front of more eyeballs, some of the people attached to those eyeballs will inevitably be into it, and they just might end up buying quarter-zips and event tickets. Hamming up the poshness is the only way to make a living, just as every other stream of online content — including Schooner pouting at his pints — eventually freezes into exaggerated tropes that allow this kind of content to circulate more smoothly.
Sometime around nine, I turn around and he’s right there: Mr Scorer, wearing a Paddington Bear jumper and quadruple-parked: holding both a glass of wine and a bottle of beer in both of his hands, for four drinks in total. He’s surrounded by an evolving knot of admirers, some of whom ask for selfies, which he cheerily accepts. When I introduce myself later on and ask for a chat, he is less obliging. He wants to know what kind of piece I’m writing. He wants to know what questions I’d ask if he agrees to be asked questions. He asks if I was invited; I say I bought a ticket. With a polite, firm handshake, my interview request is denied.
Then I try my luck with Archie Scott Brown himself, who looks to be in his mid-to-late-twenties, and has scant biographical information available online. But as I get his attention, Schooner swoops in, at the speed of a fully charged Lime bike, and whispers something in his ear. They step away from me and talk. Then Scott Brown asks if I can follow him down the stairs to the lobby, and says he’ll only take questions over email the following day. (As of the time of publication, he hasn’t responded.) We’re now standing by the door, and he asks if I’ll stick around. I decide against making a visit to B London tonight, and tramp back to Gloucester Road in the cold.
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