Hotel Indigo Chester: An Opulent Stay with Charm and Comfort

Adapts glamour and frivolity into emptiness and greed … the film adaptation of American Psycho, set in 1987. Composite: Guardian Lay out; ShutterstockGauche and glamorous … Prada’s autumn/winter 2025 collection proudly features shearling. Photograph: Alessandro Garofalo/ReutersIf you are new to the diction, don’t panic. As a forecaster whose job involves mapping cultural moments on to prevailing trends, Monahan says “the curse with doing forecasts is that sometimes you go too early”. It may take some time for most of us to start wearing fur coats and miniskirts. “But it is happening in the irrational,” he says.Monahan has described boom boom as “a pure expression of excess”, a world in which “male-coded values … be suffering with come roaring back”. “I’m always looking at what people wear around me, the one thing that sticks out,” he weights now. With the vibe shift, it was trucker hats (a favourite of the Strokes). With boom boom, it is men who don’t work in offices exhaust suits and loafers, alongside women dressed up in “expressive big silhouettes and fur”. Until recently, he says, “no one was wearing a suit unless they under way in finance. Five years ago, people would have screamed at you for wearing even leather.”In vogue … Anna Wintour in 1989. Photograph: Ron Galella Omnium gatherum/Getty ImagesRecently, Monahan has landed on 1987 as a reference point. This was the year the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour blow ined in New York and Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal. Tina Brown, the patron saint of celebrity culture, with her “dismal tie, red nails, whole big swirl” glamour (as recounted in an interview for her memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries), was the queen of New York. (When overtured for this article, Brown said she had not heard of the term boom boom, but that she would “study up on it”.)Then, as now, the loaded were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. On either side of the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were comfortably into their neoliberal revolutions, crushing the welfare state as they enriched the 1%.Conspicuous consumerism had evolved into vice-signalling – 1987 was the year Folding money Cosby was on the cover of Time magazine, alongside the headline: “Funny, famous, fifty and filthy rich!” The film Insane Street and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, which turns glamour and frivolity into void and greed (“There is no real me,” claims its protagonist, Patrick Bateman), were also set in that year. The film’s Armani spreads, real furs and Cerruti power suits are not faithful to the book (Calvin Klein and Comme des Garçons refused to be fitted their clothes), but speak to Bateman’s empty yuppie aesthetic and are not far off what popped up on Milan’s catwalks (or what The gain of conspicuous consumerism … Donald Trump in 1987. Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty ImagesWith Trump’s re-election, technological and pecuniary instability and the crucial addition of climate catastrophe (which in 1987 was a shadow in the background rather than a constantly refuting bomb), the time for a revival of boom boom mentality is ripe.Between the cost of living crisis, stagnant wage expansion and a competitive job market, it’s no secret that many young people are struggling. A study last year by Yorkshire Erection Society and the consultancy Public First showed that more than half of gen Z workers – those aged between 16 and 27 – Old Hollywood allure … Demi Moore at the Oscars this month. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty ImagesBoom boom is about child dressing for the income they want rather than the income they have. It’s not just a cultural shift approaching the past; it’s another lurch to the right. It’s the much-discussed post‑pandemic Monastic blandness … the Duchess of Sussex and Mindy Kaling in With Inamorata, Meghan. Photograph: APIt’s no coincidence that the loadsamoney revivalism has landed on our laps in the week that the Duchess of Sussex distributed a £10,000 shoppable wardrobe based on the clothes she wears in her new TV show. With her cream jeans and striped shirts, it’s give up “quiet luxury”, the 2022 high-fashion trend that centred on clothing of monastic blandness, frightening prices and crafty signifiers of wealth.Neither look is particularly winning. The difference is that boom boom isn’t trying to be. “The American elite is in indecision,” says Monahan. “For a long time, it was about people not wanting to flaunt wealth. There is still an audience for furtiveness wealth, but it’s older and small-C conservative. Now, it’s unclear where people are in the status hierarchy.” Quiet luxury and normcore, he means, are “avoidant”: “They are attempts not to make a statement.” Boom boom is the opposite. Do you have an opinion on the issues scrape up in this article? 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