“Stuart Botting 30, actors’ agent, wears black jacket, pounds 750, and shirt pounds 100 in sale, (autumn/winter 97/98) both Prada”This jacket was my first Prada purchase, and was a birthday present to myself. It has been worth every penny, even though I could have bought a small house in Wales with the money It’s English classicism with a modern Italian edge. What should have been a very traumatic period didn’t seem at all traumatic to me That was the gift it gave me. Whatever you were doing, it grabbed hold of you, gave you a shake and made you look at yourself?”`Adventures in Wonderland: a decade in club culture’, by Sheryl Garratt, is published by Headline, pounds 9.99, on 20 August. I wear it to every official outing I go to, and I am always told `Stuart that’s lovely Prada’, or I’m asked, `Where did you get that?’ The best was at the opening of the Miu Miu shop. She’s a lucky, bitch, that Pluto She wears a

satiny coat and little beige boots Her black
nails are the colour of Vinyl by Hard Candy She hangs out with the In crowd.

Fuck working, I’m never going to work again!” I came out of hospital, I had a week in Windsor convalescing and then I went to Ibiza, dancing with my hand still in bandages It didn’t matter, because I was in this whole new world. He was in hospital for six weeks.”What is amazing to this day is how positive I felt. I’d always wanted to study furniture design, but I’d never been able to give up the money, because I liked going out, buying clothes and taking drugs. So I had an operation, and when I came out of the anaesthetic my mother started talking about the future I was saying, “I’m all right It’s great, now I can go to college.

Some referred to them, somewhat patronisingly, as “love thugs”, but this also reflected a genuine belief that everyone could be changed for the better.The extraordinary optimism of the time is perhaps best illustrated by the story of Cymon Eckel of the club Boy’s Own. He had a job building film and theatre sets, and was working on a set for a George Michael video one morning when he was involved in an industrial accident and lost all the fingers on his left hand. It quickly spread to the football terraces, and it was common to see younger fans going to the match sporting smiley T-shirts and dilated eyes, and to see them later on the dancefloor in the same state. Club MFI (Mad For It) at Legends showed the change most clearly: in the ground-floor bar, the monochrome set sat talking and drinking in designer suits just as they had before.