NYC
A pox on both our houses! You know, I proudly take it as a given by now, but feel a little misplaced melancholy when you refer to New York as my town. Living here, I admit to acquiring, in some strange exercise of backwards entropy, not rust but polish. I have Gone Native!
It’s said you’re a real New Yorker after five years of being here, although in typical New York fashion, this definition is self-servingly malleable according to who is laying claim - and why. In this way we end up with SoHo House 2.1 - the inevitable New York version. No, the place is not quite a theme park - a la the hilarious Ralph Lauren Manse on 72nd Street - but I wonder if it shouldn’t be. It is, after all, dismayingly short of what I had naively imagined would be one of those stuffy, cigar smoke-filled sanctuaries full of crusty old waiters, thrillingly misogynistic old rich geysers, huge sofas with the stuffing spilling out and gorgeous women with long, Bakelite cigarette holders shrieking, “Oh but dahling, you simply must…!” Perhaps this is because I have never gotten around to visiting the London original, and why it is probably best that I never do.
My few ex-pat friends here loudly complain that SoHo House NY is “trashy”, that they “let effing anyone in” and that the rules for admittance in London are more stringent. I wonder if this is true, or if we’ve all, pond and island-hopping opportunists that we are, simply drunk our own Anglo-flavoured Kool Aid. After all, any Brit here will slyly tell you (if you’re also British), that it does not behoove you, even nowadays, even in Manhattan, to misplace your English accent.
Gain admittance to what many think of as fortress SoHo House NYC and among all the bewilderingly dressed way up, the jarring American accented and the uptalking PR girls with their hair stuck to their lipgloss, is the miniature special smoking section cunningly disguised as: The Games Room. This is arguably the most English room in the place because it is here that daringly decadent sorts are permitted to smoke. Aware that this dubious privilege, together with the $1000 plus yearly membership dues, allow you to indulge on a mere whim in a thrilling game of table football, well, you feel almost obliged to coincidentally fancy lighting up a fag when you’re in there whether you want to or not, don’t you? It really makes you feel like a Someone.
But wearying of this, faced with the rather impolite coughing up of your own lung tissue, you are entitled to stagger up to the weirdly self-congratulatory ambience of the roof deck where the “swimming” pool may as well be rubber and is fit only for self-consciously paddling-while-drinking (surely a misdemeanor) and the displaying of flesh (usually disappointing, and therefore in my view a felony). Everyone everywhere is terribly busy protesting too much, sartorially or otherwise - not least myself because, apart from writing this, and horrid secret-snob that I am, I recently had Amex amend the first name on my credit card to an initial only. This was in no small part to thwart the christian name greetings of “the help” (so much for noblesse oblige), an over-familiarity that in England would be regarded as rather an affront - to both parties.
Perhaps it is just accents. I wonder how different the two places can really be at, say, 2am on a Sunday morning? You say, Sybil, that the British version is fuelled by the great levellers of powder and champagne, as must be the American copycat. Ditto, surely, the schmoozing, skirt/pants-chasing and general atmosphere of anxiety, of imminent status slippage. In London I can only assume the typically English habit of consciously dressing down makes it seem even less some ridiculous jazz age fever dream of my Americanly Brideshead imagination than the SoHo House I have here, right in New York - a city that is, as you say, my very own.
As Brits we do pride ourselves on both our deliberate crudeness on one hand, and our would-be lack of crassness and upright composure at the other. (At worst we might charitably admit to a surfeit of sarcasm, while the Americans, baffled by the puzzling combination of MerchantIvory films and English football hooligans, try just too hard and too loudly.) We take it for granted that we can have it both ways. Anyone else (unless British) trying to pull off this nifty trick is a wanker - doomed to failure, or at least a Paddington Hard Stare. But put a bunch of Brits in SoHo House NY for an evening, turn the sound down to mute, and I wonder if you’d be able to tell the difference? Possibly not. Except the Yanks, bless ‘em, would be better dressed.
Have a nice day!
Copyright Britical 2005