Paris and London are twin cities when it comes to fashion and the underground. After dark, at a certain time of year, party collectives from the two capitals commingle like long-lost brothers.
Borough (“London in its purest form” a.k.a. the hip-hop collective that “made fakemink”)’s friendship with United Freaks (“Liquid youth. Lived, unfiltered”) is exemplary of this fact. Lament(ist) hit the runway at PFW Men’s in June with its designs for the after-hours romantic and rockstar in everyone. Hours later, they all joined forces to put on an 850-strong party that got everyone talking about what happens when scenes collide.
Here’s their guide for throwing a fashion week afterparty that packs a punch.
- Let scenes collide
The healthiest scenes are rarely the most coherent. They’re the ones where different audiences overlap naturally. A rapper shares a stage with a post-punk band, a stylist becomes a fan, a photographer leaves following a DJ. New scenes emerge through these encounters, not through careful categorisation.
For a long time people belonged to one scene. You were indie, punk, rapper, fashion, electronic. Today those boundaries feel increasingly irrelevant. Young people move between worlds constantly. They’ll spend the afternoon at a runway show, watch a post-punk band in the evening and end the night listening to trap. Their taste is fluid.
London’s underground isn’t defined by one sound – it’s chaotic in the best way. That crossover is what makes it exciting. Artists like øway, Gab3, Buckshot and Zukovstheworld shared a space at our party with Sheet Noise, The Teenagers and talented DJs.
- Make fashion listen again
Fashion doesn’t need more exclusivity; it needs stronger reasons to stay out after the show. The most memorable nights aren’t defined by who’s on the guest list, but by the artists people discover unexpectedly. We stop making music the accompaniment of fashion, and fashion lives in music when people dance.
- Make people feel like they belong
The fashion industry can feel exclusive and overly serious. For a long time, Fashion Week felt closed off, a guarded community people watched rather than participated in.
Scenes only grow when new people feel welcome. At our party, people left having met someone new or danced to a sound they’d never heard before. The most valuable spaces are the ones that dissolve that distance. Where someone attending for the first time feels as much a part of the night as someone who’s been around for years.
- Embrace cultural liquidity
People no longer move within fixed scenes. Fashion, music, art and nightlife increasingly overlap, and identities shift between them. A party shouldn’t try to define one audience; it should create the conditions for different communities to meet, influence each other and leave with something unexpected.
United Freaks exists to create those collisions. The goal was never to import London into Paris. It was to translate that openness into a Parisian context. Paris has extraordinary taste and history, but sometimes its cultural scenes remain compartmentalised. At the same time, Paris itself feels like it’s changing.
We wanted to create spaces where those boundaries dissolve for one night. To us that’s more interesting than programming a night around one audience. The Paris scene admires that about London’s underground.
We never build lineups around one genre. We build them around energy. A post-punk band can share a stage with a rapper, an indie songwriter with an experimental DJ. Those combinations shouldn’t feel unusual, they’re a reflection of how people actually consume culture today.
In many ways, London gave Paris permission to think like that, and vice versa.
Borough, founded by Jono Parathan in 2022, took the London rap scene from stagnant to the explosive breakthrough into the mainstream that we saw in 2025 by elevating emerging talent through underground gigs. Omar Zakarie, a BA Fashion student at the University of Westminster, founded Lament(ist) after photographing gigs prompted him to pursue that “same musical melancholy” through fashion. United Freaks was founded by Leo and Ilan in Paris in 2024.
