Are Gen Z wrong to romanticise working class culture on TikTok?

Picture this: trendy types fist bump each other outside a green-bricked corner pub. Someone wearing Maison Margiela Tabis clinks their pint glass against their mate’s tooth gem. Young men with moustaches jostle and gesticulate, clasping a rollie in one hand, the other wrapped around a pint of Guinness. Everyone is thin and rich and young and the world ends with Soho.

This, according to TikTok, is “London pub culture.” Most Londoners will scoff. To some, this is sacrilege. One montage of a group of stylish pint-sippers entitled “pints, chit chat and good people >” has three million views and over 3,000 comments, mostly full of mockery and derision. “One of the hardest watches of the year,” one commenter says. “Rah bro ignore my iPhone 15 pro max propped on the ledge bro we’re having a pint,” another adds. Others have accused its creator, the influencer Max Lepage-Keef, of ‘cosplaying’ as working class, and in terms of the insults hurled his way, it’s this one that seems to have had the most sticking power.