Mocktail menus, functional drinks and a very specific shade of off-white are apparently the mood of the moment, and I have thoughts

Nobody Told Me We Were All Being Discreet Now

Something has genuinely shifted in how Londoners spend a night out, and it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to notice, mostly because I was too busy assuming everyone else’s soda water was, in fact, a gin and soda. Mocktail menus are no longer the sad, single afterthought item squeezed onto the bottom of a drinks list. They have expanded properly, and demand for functional drinks, the sort with adaptogens and mysterious mood-boosting claims, has grown sharply enough that bar staff now discuss them with the same seriousness once reserved for a proper Negroni.

Londoners are not, by most accounts, giving up drinking wholesale. They are simply choosing more carefully, which is either a genuinely healthy cultural shift or the single most London thing imaginable, treating a night out with the same considered restraint you’d apply to a mortgage application.

The Aesthetic Has Caught Up With The Mood

Fittingly, the whole vibe has a colour now. Pantone’s Cloud Dancer, a soft, frosted off-white, is apparently everywhere this season, worn under a high-necked leather jacket or head to toe as one deeply committed look, which tracks: nothing says considered moderation quite like a colour so pale it borders on an apology. Footwear has taken its own, considerably stranger turn, with split-toe Tabi flats moving from niche fashion-crowd signifier to genuinely mainstream, while garden clogs, built on London’s long-standing Birkenstock devotion, keep gaining ground for anyone who has accepted that comfort now outranks vanity most weeknights.

I will admit a personal soft spot for the Tabi trend specifically, having spent an entire decade watching London’s more committed fashion crowd wear them as a kind of secret handshake, before the rest of us caught on. There is something quietly satisfying about watching a shoe survive a full ten years of niche status before finally getting its mainstream moment, entirely on its own terms.

A City Learning To Enjoy Itself Differently, Not Less

What strikes me most about this shift is how little it actually resembles abstinence. Nobody is staying home. The bars are still full, the mocktail menus simply mean people are staying out longer without the following morning’s specific tax on their goodwill, which, four decades into most of our collective drinking careers, might genuinely be the most sensible cultural development London nightlife has produced in years.

Whether this becomes a lasting shift or simply this particular season’s specific flavour of self-improvement remains, as ever with London trends, genuinely difficult to call this early. But watching an entire city quietly recalibrate its relationship with a Tuesday night out, one considered mocktail at a time, feels like exactly the kind of small, unglamorous cultural story worth actually paying attention to.

Discreet, Deliberate, And Apparently Rather Well Dressed About It

Whatever comes next season, London’s current mood, careful drinking, considered footwear, an entire palette built around restraint, feels like a genuinely honest snapshot of a city figuring out how to enjoy itself without quite so much collateral damage the next morning.

More from Lowri Griffiths at her author page on prat.uk.