The Party in Soho That Brexit Forgot

The Vinyl Factory sits in Soho like a secret being kept badly—a former pressing plant turned arts venue, occupying the same neighborhood that has cycled through identities so many times the cycling has become the identity. Hunter Boots threw a festival kickoff party there, which is as reasonable a premise as any for getting an interesting room of people together and calling it work.

The guest list pulled from three different industries without worrying about coherence: Stella McCartney and Alasdhair Wills on the fashion side, Kit Harington doing his thing as the man who’d already died and been resurrected on Game of Thrones more times than felt dignified, Courtney Love in whatever phase she’s in this season, Bebe Rexha, Jaime Winstone, Dustin Lance Black, Tom Daley, Cosmo Pyke. The Rabbit Hole DJ’d with surprise guests dropping in. Cocktails circulated. People talked, and eventually, as these things tend to go, the dancefloor stopped being optional.

Hunter was going for the outdoor festival feeling compressed into an interior—that specific summer warmth, the loose energy of a crowd that doesn’t need to be anywhere else. It worked the way these things usually work: adequately in person, better in photographs. The point was never really the atmosphere. The point was the room and who was in it.

Article 50 had been triggered two months earlier, but standing in that building in Soho you wouldn’t have felt it. London has always been a city that collects people from everywhere and declines to return them, and no parliamentary vote has yet found a mechanism to change that particular fact about the place.