We know, we know — you’ve heard enough about the Indie Sleaze revival, you’ve seen a hundred TikToks on the matter, and you’ve already scuffed the ballet pumps you bought yet again (although that’s the point). Indie is back. Skinny jeans, holey cardigans and eyes sticky with kohl that many vowed never to tout again after the financial crash of 2008 have all made it back to the forefront of fashion through the guise of its next iteration, ‘indie sleaze’. But do you really know Indie? Cast your mind back to the early 2000s — perhaps you’re too young to remember it the first time, which is why in this week’s episode of the second series of our i-Dentity podcast, we’re doing it for you. Join us as we delve back into the genesis of Indie at the cusp of the new millennium, the death of Britpop, the free-wheelin’ hedonism of gig venues in student campus cities and their charity shop-clad crowds, and the inevitable transition of indie from an in-the-know sect of music and nightlife into a cultural phenomenon that birthed generation of new media, fashion, lifestyle, pop music and the dreaded ‘Hipster’ apocalypse.

Widely considered one of the last influential subcultures of the pre-digital age, as well as the first to be documented by the arrival of social media, there’s more to Indie than the photos you’ve seen re-circulating online. For a new generation, indie clearly means something, and Instagram accounts like @indiesleaze have opened a portal for Gen Z to see another world that existed not long before they came of age – one without iPhones and the self-regulation of social media. It was a time when hardly anyone worked, most people were at art school, and everyone who was anyone was in a band (or dating someone who was). It marked an unconventional approach to looking fashionable (which often mean the opposite of looking rich) as well as developing new ideas around beauty (an anti-beauty rejection of faked tans and Hollywood perfection). Social media was just emerging and soon Myspace, Flickr and Facebook would provide the platform for these nights out. Uploading 60 35mm flash photos of a single night out or the dreaded student photographer - the inspiration for indie sleaze.

Indie was the last true subculture in the UK before social media took us all online, but what was it? In this episode, Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director of i-D, speaks to Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, one of the biggest bands of the noughties, and a veteran of the indie scene. Karley Sciortino, writer and filmmaker who landed in London’s indie scene in the early 2000s discusses what life in a London squat was really like — especially for young women at the time – and Erol Alkan, the man behind the legendary Monday night party Trash, at which Amy Winehouse, Kings of Leon and Peaches were regulars, discusses the rise and fall of indie in the noughties.