Originally I wanted to theme this the ‘reckless abandon’ issue. The prediction earlier in the year in the northern hemisphere – as it was the past few years – was that 2024 would finally deliver on that bacchanalian summer everyone had been waiting for, the one where people would party in a way that hadn’t been seen for decades. I was hoping we’d experience the same thing. Instead of a bacchanalian summer, however, it ended up being a Brat summer – which was fun, but mostly kind of aesthetic. It’s hard to fight the economy, I guess, and people tend to not really be in the mood to party like the world is burning when the world is actually burning.

It’s hard to tell though, because partying is no longer mainstream and broadcast; it’s niche and insular. We’re too jaded to believe that those pictures in newspaper ‘social pages’ are anything but people doing their jobs, usually shilling stuff. We hear all the time about how staged and boring the big shindigs like the Oscars and Met Gala are once you’re inside those hallowed rooms; nothing like their equivalent in years past, when party-going might have meant spotting Bianca Jagger at Studio 54 on a horse led by a naked man covered in gold glitter. No, these days the real revelry is harder to identify because it happens at members-only clubs and underground sex parties and dancing around our friends’ living rooms. With homebody gen Z leading the culture, sometimes it’s even disguised, like margs after a sauna session or an afternoon spent at a pottery studio with a bar on-site. (As we learnt during those dark days when we classed group video chats as a party, wherever you find fun and connection counts, and any format that doesn’t ask you to stay awake until 3am in heels and shapewear, and probably involves some kind of chips-and-dip, is something we can all get behind.)