The NoMad Hotel takes up much oxygen in London chat of late. It is a grand building in Covent Garden, with a yawning atrium that has a lot of sunlight come in and a lot of Instagram photos come out. Rooms can cost in the region of £400 a night.
But Londoners aren’t sleeping here, because they’ve got their own beds a short tube ride away. They’re eating here instead, enjoying “local and regional bounty” that includes suckling pig confit with sides of hispi cabbage, and slightly unlocal Korean yam. They’re gingerly sipping cocktails at the bar. They’re downing margaritas in the basement to a thumping DJ. It is a hotel in the most traditional, overpriced sense of the word, and yet it is still one of the most current hangouts in London.
In fact, hotels have never been cooler – which is quite the turnaround. Several years back, drinks in the hotel bar were for lonely businessmen and the women who were paid to love them. They were seen as stuffy. Old-fashioned. Dull. Or – the worst of all charges – touristy. Not so at the NoMad. Alongside it, several other hotels young and old are also enjoying a recent and ongoing win of social currency: the Standard in the former Brutalist-cum-Barbarella building of the Camden Town Hall; the enormous Hoxton by Blackfriars Bridge; Aldgate’s Leman Locke with its packed out Pan-Asian vegan restaurant, Alter. Even the Soho House group is confidently raising membership prices and room rates as of this year says a report in The Financial Times.
Hotels are arguably the new clubs. And with clubs, comes merch. In the gilded age of brands-as-bands-of-brothers, menswearheads want in on cool, wearable souvenirs that proudly attest their association. Hotels are closing in on this with their own merch, and by utilising the pre-existing fandoms of pre-existing brands with partnerships. God (and the bottom line) loves a collab. In 2018, Gucci teamed up with LA’s actual ivory tower Chateau Marmont for a range that plated totes, T-shirts and hoodies with the hotel’s dancing Pan mascot. Exit through the gift shop, and the hotel also offers its own merch depicting an outline of the famous block castle on very Seventies sweats.
After successfully branching out into swimwear, cult label CDLP leaned into its own brand by partnering with Cuixmala, an achingly exclusive eco-resort that occupies a five kilometre stretch of the Mexican Pacific coastline. Swim shorts and briefs in pink, blue and tangerine took their cue from the hotel's hyper-surreal, candied domes and verandas. As with all things CDLP, it was a bit sexy. And, by magnifying its own cult status with that of a much Googled dream stay, the Nordic outfit wasn't just making swimwear that looked like the checkerboard pools of the world's most exclusive hotel, it was making swimwear for a stay at the world's most exclusive hotel. There are few pieces left on sale.
More recently, London-inspired, LA-based outfit Frame went even older. A partnership with The Ritz Paris – the first of its kind for the vaunted hotel – resulted in a collection that put the signature cursive to good use in a range of Nineties-adjacent gymwear. It is far too good for the gym. A duffle bag in off-white is complete with the grand Ritz crest and a blue room tag. Navy sweatshirts have ‘concierge’ stitched to the back in a tall, grand typeface. There are hoodies, pool towels, T-shirts, jeans and even a water bottle – all things that make a stay at The Ritz somewhat permanent without having to step foot into the lobby.
There could be many reasons as to why fashion has booked back into the hotel. The democratisation of travel at large has resulted in the jetset’s rapid deglamourisation. It is still a privileged thing to see the world. But, one can do it much more affordably with the help of budget airlines and Airbnb – and rightly so. Hotels are often the elite (and expensive) foil to that; a last bastion of old ‘luxury’ before the term came to encompass designer baseball caps and iPhone cases. The Covid hangover has also fuelled the uptick. After being intermittently grounded and confined to our four walls for two years, we don’t want to stay in somewhere that feels just like home. We want something to feel otherworldly, to feel special. A treat, in short – and we want to wear these hotel experiences, to show off, regardless of whether one booked an executive suite or not.
So fabled is the hotel that brands have eschewed collabs entirely to tap into this holy brand power. They don’t even need a reception desk. Just as influencer Emily Oberg’s label Sport & Rich is a pastiche of an LA health club from a time when Denise Richards was a supermodel and not a Real Housewife, Australian outfit Hotel Poros is a hallucination of a resort rather than a real place. “My heritage is Greek, so I wanted to do a love letter to Greece and bring that world into whatever I was doing,” says the brand’s founder and artistic director Fotis Tetikis over the phone. “I worked for French luxury brands so I got to travel to Paris often. I know this is gonna sound strange, but I love hotel gift stores and souvenir stores where I get a lot of T-shirts, and Hotel Poros sort of came from that.”
The brand’s Instagram account is peppered with the undulating white curves of Greek tavernas, the undulating olive curves of burly men, and seaviews, thankfully, without sunburnt Brits drinking a beer at 10am. It’s clear that this is a romantic flashback of your Greek holiday; one long extended version of Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu, but just without any freak diving accidents. In fact, the idea of Hotel Poros was to be as remote and as untainted as possible. “Poros is one of my favourite islands in Greece purely because there’s no tourists. Mykonos and Santorini are amazing, but I don’t wanna travel all that way to speak to Brits and Americans and Australians. I want to disconnect and relax.” That idea is something we can all buy into.
The brand itself centres on resortwear from the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties, a time when “everyone had an alter ego when they were away” says Tetikis. It is a certain kind of anonymity that is scarcer than ever in the social media era. Thus, it has never been more valuable. Hotel Poros is cashing in on the traveller as a transient stranger, or the fabled resort crew that regularly shares rooms with guests. The short shorts, T-shirts and sweatshirts advertise resort activities that will never come to be, like a supervised weightlifting program by the hotel pool, or Eleni’s water ski school. “Even old movies, whether they’re at Hotel du Cap, or in Capri, there’s a coolness to the gym instructors and the staff of the hotel; how they tuck their T-shirts in, and the silhouettes, and the way they pose. There’s a coolness to it.”
Resortwear brands are nothing new of course. But building a brand around a fictional resort is. And, though the idea of the hotel-as-regular-haunt has peaked and troughed over the last few decades, dressing up in the gift shop is a fairly recent idea that is only gaining steam. Tetikis, an avowed data cruncher, says that his clients are largely based beyond the permasunny shores of Australia in Europe, the Middle East and the USA. They’re buying what is ostensibly traditional resortwear year round. Merch from Frame x The Ritz Paris is still being produced well past initial launch too. “I think people love the idea of a hotel because of the novelty of it all. It’s the coming and going of it all. You’re meeting in the lobby, you’re drinking at the bar, you’re catching a boat to a village to get lunch. It’s this situation that is the total opposite of real life,” says Tetikis. Or, perhaps, you’re dining, drinking and dancing at the NoMad surrounded by guests who are absolutely there for a good time (and not a long one). This special sort of transience feels unique to hotels. And, in a time when wages are stagnating while costs are soaring, holidays are a rare respite when we can cosplay as well-travelled trust fund kids or the resident gym instructor pin-up – and we don’t even need to book a flight to make believe.
