Is the Original Hedi Boy From Essex? How the UK’s Most Infamous County Rewrote the British Underground

From Hedi Boys to Ug rappers, Essex has been pivotal to Britain's creative culture, so why are we always putting it down?

A style revival has been brewing up across social media since the latter half of last year and is continuing to shape fashion trends and culture in 2026: the Hedi Boy. Named after former creative director of YSL and Dior Homme, Hedi Slimane, the look is a precursor to what we now call indie sleaze - all black, with skinny “drainpipe” jeans and angular hair cut synonymous with early 2000s style.

The core source of inspiration? A basement club in Southend-on-Sea, in Essex.

Junk Club, based at the Royal Hotel on Southend’s seafront, was started in 2002 by school friends Rhys Webb and Oliver Abbott, with core members including Ciaran O’Shea on art/design and Dean Chalkley on photography. Southend had been hit hard by the decline of the British seaside; the advent of low-cost airlines in the 1990s gave the resort destination a sense faded glory. Junk attracted outcast teens and adolescents mooching around the pier-side with nothing to do.

Hedi Boys are just one of many Essex underground attributes that went on to impact Britain’s wider cultural landscape

Despite this, Southend has upheld a reputable party scene rooted in deep passion for music - it was the heartland for mod culture in the 1960s, and major backdrop of acid house in the 1990s, where local Essex acts including The Prodigy, SL2 and SmartE's fronted enviably unhinged parties. Junk tapped into Southend's storied club history, this time with with goth looks and post-punk sounds.

“There’s always been a big underground dance scene in Southend,” says Junk art designer, Ciaran O’Shea. “Our crowd probably came more from the mod-scene or indie scene, though we did play acid house and jungle. In some towns things can be quite tribal, but Junk was such a melting pot of people coming together.”

Slimane credits his entire ‘age of innocence’ menswear revolution - as “Myspace on the dance floor and pretty much the Southend scene”.

The explosive youth energy and distinctive Southend Junk style spawned a host of bands that included The Horrors (whom Webb was a member), These New Puritans and The Violets, generating a buzz that caught the attention of Slimane.

Head of menswear for Christian Dior, the sartorial Frenchman was spotted in the Royal Hotel's basement to poach Essex lads for models included George Barnett and Tom Hein of These New Puritans, Hugh Webb - younger brother of Rhys Webb, Jordan Cunningham of the band Clout and Armin Suljic, all of whom appeared on the A/W 2007 Dior Homme runway.

Speaking to Dazed in 2007, Slimane credits his entire ‘age of innocence’ menswear revolution - which would extend to his subsequent appointment as creative director at Yves St. Laurent - as “Myspace on the dance floor and pretty much the Southend scene”.

Two decades on, the Southend-bred silhouettes that caught Slimane’s eye are being reinterpreted across TikTok and underground fashion circles around the world. But in 2026, the Hedi Boy revival feels less like reinvention and more like a return to the Essex basement-club energy that shaped it.

Yet, at the time, it seemed incredulous that somewhere like Southend could make such permeant inroads into a haute couture. Describing the Junk scene at the time, The Guardian refers to Southend as ‘nondescript’: a ‘shabby seaside resort’ that’s a ‘non-place’ - a sense of disbelief that remains common to this day regarding Essex culture. It’s a mindset stapled into the British snob subconscious - that Essex is unable to give us anything culturally rich: it is nothing more than an undesirable place with undesirable people.

“People like to have a punchline. There are people from Essex that probably fulfil the stereotypes, but the vast majority of people aren’t like that. There’s phenomenal talent with great integrity, with passion and love for art and culture.”

More so than any British county, Essex stands out as the most infamous. A Reform-stronghold jaded by reality television and tropes, the east England county has captured imaginations far beyond its borders. As Essex writer Tim Burrows points out, it is “scorned as the crudest, stupidest symbol of Englishness” both nationally and abroad. O’Shea recalls when The Only Way is Essex first televised in 2010, ‘it felt like it set us back ten paces’: “People like to have a punchline. There are people from Essex that probably fulfil the stereotypes, but the vast majority of people aren’t like that. There’s phenomenal talent with great integrity, with passion and love for art and culture.”

The Hedi Boys are just one of many Essex underground attributes that went on to impact Britain’s wider cultural landscape, a contribution often buried by the county’s proximity to London. It’s not just that London’s cultural elite dismiss Essex while claiming its underground cultural output - Essexers have long labelled themselves Londoners to avoid embarrassment. “It’s interesting growing up in Southend and being aware of the stereotypes - especially horrible derogatory things towards women - you had this point where people shied away from Essex,” says O’Shea, who says the county was once a “dirty” word.

The London-Essex conflation also helps explain why Essex is so easily dismissed as brainless or throwaway, which makes Lorde’s anthemic 2024 attribution of Charli XCX as a “young girl from Essex” all the more significant in reframing the narrative. This shift is also seen on Dev Hynes’, aka Blood Orange, embrace of his Essex roots on his searingly personal 2025 album, Essex Honey.

However, there’s still a tendency for Essexers to masquerade under the London demonym. Today’s self-proclaimed London Saviour, Fakemink, is from Basildon. An Essex town established in the 1950s to rehouse east enders from a broken post-war London, it was once a socialist stronghold populated by factory workers whose youth clubs and art theatres gave birth to the electro-synth genre, spawning the likes of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure in the 1970s - yet another caveat of the Essex underground that went on to have a tectonic impact on the global pop ecosystem.

“Essex is home to pretty dynamic radical people. Amazing bands and subcultures have come from here - Dr. Feelgood, rave culture, places like Romford, Andy C, Ram Records, Danny Breaks. People who have truly shaped world culture,” says Ciaran, who says Junk helped reinforce a sense of local pride in the Essex underground. “It never stopped - we finished Junk, we did the ECC - Experimental Circle Club parties, Offset Festival in Hainault Forest, it always kept pushing on.”

In a circular twist of events, Fakemink was photographed last year by Hedi Slimane for The Face magazine, cementing his position as the poster boy of today's explosive Ug rap scene. A Hedi Boy in 2026 could be a skinny-tie wearing influencer paying homage to the Southend scene, but now it could also be a Supreme-clad rapper from Basildon. Whatever way you look at it, the common denominator is clear: it's straight from Essex.