In regards to fashion, the New Gypsies surround themselves with mixtures of a lot of textures, patterns, colors – why do you think they choose to express themselves this way?
A traveler calls their belongings “Tat”. So everything has that kind of ragged edge to it. I don’t know why it is. I think to them, they’re just doing what we do [when we dress up for an event]. And a lot of the time I photographed them at festivals and things. And by its nature, festivals are theatrical. It is sort of vintage, the counterculture – it’s all real and it’s 24/7. It’s an identity, but, at the end of the day, it’s the lifestyle that’s important – understanding horses, understanding that a horse needs to know who’s the boss, understanding good horsemanship. The horse is not there just as a look.
Do you think the New Gypsies’ lifestyle is a realistic alternative to our consumerist, media-saturated one?
You’ve made that question quite loaded, because obviously it is in one sense, but practically speaking, no, it’s not, because you’ve got to have the mindset. These people take to this naturally. They already decided they don’t want to live in a box watching a box. They’re psychologically equipped to do it. The riots we had in England, that was because people are going “Fuck off, we want it as well.” The media saturation and everything is sort of based on that kind of promise and that dream and it’s all about consumerism. So, you have one group of people who have gone out of the cities and found another way of doing things, and then you have the other people who are in the cities and are just fucking burning it up, trying to destroy it, because they’re so fucked off with it all.