Cult, Status and the Mythos of Queues in Romano Pizzichini’s New Short, ‘The Line’

Talk of the end of streetwear has fuelled fashion discourse in recent years – but someone forgot to tell the kids that stand in line outside Soho stores in London for brands like Palace, Supreme and Stussy on every single “drop day”. It’s this culture – its good and its bad – that is the focus of a new short film, The Line, by Romano Pizzichini. 

Running for 13 minutes, it tells the story of Dev (played by Daniel De Bourg), a long-term hypebeast, as they were once called, and his relative status in the queue for a drop by fictional brand Candal. If that’s the bare bones of the story, it also takes in other meaty issues around queues, drops and fashion – from the supposed death of subculture to the queue as both community and place to perform, the transactional nature of life in the world of social media and ageing out of the scene.

Pizzichini, who has previously made films about Grime and first generation Latin American kids coming of age in London, formed the idea based on some of the knotty issues he was dealing with himself. “It’s getting to an age where you’re interested in these things, and maybe you have the disposable income, but you feel you’re maybe too old to be doing them,” he says.

One of the best parts of The Line is Candal itself – a fictional fashion line, only represented by a surf top on one of the characters, and a well-designed logo, but that somehow manages to be desirable. This detail alone makes Pizzichini’s point: showing our rat-like frenzy for the buzzy and the new even when we’re cognisant that this is not healthy, let alone real. At one of the screenings at the Prince Charles cinema in London this month, the meta nature of this desire played out with a fittingly choreographed raffle to win the surf top seen in the film. Palpable disappointment filled the auditorium after the ticket numbers were read out.

“It got to a point where I was like ‘oh my gosh. The moodboard is great, this could be amazing’,” says Pizzichini, on making the ‘brand’. “And then the reality of making clothes is…I don’t know how to do any of it.” 

He adds that this experience speaks to a crucial nuance – “in a way we’re satirising it, but it’s also something that I really respect, because to do it well is so hard” – and the juxtaposition of satire and empathy is something that Pizzichini says is a signature of his films. “It’s not coming from a place that’s ‘look at how awful these people are’. It’s more ‘I’m one of them.’ And so it’s being honest about it, but also finding some redeeming qualities in it.” 

Growing up between Brazil and Canada, Pizzichini moved to London in 2007 and he has seen the uneven, chaotic, increasingly commercial trajectory of streetwear culture over the time. He remembers when Supreme first came to Soho, and walking in with no queue to buy an Andy Warhol collab with soup cans covering the T-shirt (this is now on eBay for £225). Fast forward to 2025 and the queues take in “the mom from Italy that’s come with her kid, the students, people who are traveling, local kids, or people coming in from the suburbs, and some of the quote, unquote, cool OG kids.”

The queue now goes way beyond streetwear, it’s part of much wider culture. “Now you see queues everywhere,” agrees Pizzichini. “It’s not just for clothing, it’s for food or for anything, there’s queues for jacket potatoes.” The author Ruby Tandoh recently referred to the queue as the “main character” in the story of hype foods and last year, people queued seven hours to go to a Rhode cosmetics pop-up, something that Dazed dubbed “a status symbol”. Because being in the queue for a sample sale is brag in itself – since you’re in the know about its existence in the first place. A performative factor is inevitable here then and The Line explores this, with photoshoots taking place to pass time, and one character ‘reading’ Spanish poet, Lorca, while she waits. 

The status politics are magnified too: Dev is refused entry and heads to the back of the line while another character, Ash (played by Ashden Oke, who also did the music), is seen negotiating an Instagram post about his drip coffee as thanks for allowing him to skip the queue. Mio, an East Asian woman with the bunches and quirky outfit of kawaii culture played by Mariko Nishino, confounds stereotypes – displaying her deep knowledge of streetwear culture and its demise. The real zinger of this scene comes when she is asked why she is in the queue if she knows all that? “Because I am addicted to shopping,” she replies. 

Pizzichini says a queue’s atmosphere is always charged, partly because of the excitement of potentially getting your hands on something, but also because it’s a physical space where you get to see your fellow fans IRL. “It forces a reckoning whenever you go into a queue because everything is so curated online within your algorithm,” he argues. “When you step into the real world and you see other people who are there for the same thing as you, it makes you more self aware because you’re like, ‘I’m not the same as them, but I’m waiting for the same thing.’ It makes you feel a little bit uneasy.”

There was, of course, a queue to go to see The Line, which I fully expect to continue once it’s screened again. But viewers will have to wait. Pizzichini is once more taking the meta approach. “[These screenings were] a bit like the first drop,” he says. “That’s how I’m trying to frame it for people.”

Lauren Cochrane is Senior Fashion Writer of The Guardian and contributes to publications including The Face, ELLE, Service95, Konfekt and Mr Porter. Based in London, she writes about everything from catwalk shows to footballers’ style and the linguistics of Love Island. She is author of The Ten: The Stories Behind the Fashion Classics, and the football and fashion newsletter, Style of Play.

You can read all of Lauren’s writing on Something Curated here.

Header photo: Ash (Ashden Oke) and Dev (Daniel De Bourg). All photographs courtesy of Romano Pizzichini.