Documents of what built London’s street culture (for want of a better term) seem to be dropping as if an embargo on nostalgia just got lifted. You can expect a couple of films on the city’s role in creating fashion cliques that dipped into hip-hop, skatewear and high fashion with Zelig-like ease (well, the magazine coverage made it look effortless) and a couple of books on related topics too. Another series of spots I read about in The Face time and time again were the Cuts hair salons (that name seemed to switch with each successive move) — Kensington-based until 1984’s Soho opening, where shifted three times, resulting in its current Dean Street location. Cuts founder James Lebon’s contribution to the culture is colossal (this obituary offers an overview of his achievements) from celebrity hairdresser status to early retirement from the scissors to get behind the camera and make films and music videos (trivia: if you watched Channel 4’s Passengers, then you definitely saw his work at some point). Now there’s film made of archive footage of Cuts’ history — which includes a heavy role in defining Buffalo style and creating the much imitated and maligned ‘Hoxton fin’ in the early 2000s — with the in-production Cuts the Movie documentary by Sarah Lewis. Taken from 18 years worth of film, and with access to Mark Lebon’s archive, it should show the changing face of Soho (which managed to alter significantly in the few short years I worked there) and, with Crossrail’s Godzilla steps, seems to be rapidly changing for the worse. In Cuts the Movie’s late 1990s footage, it’s pretty much a different world (bar the invincible Bar Italia). I can’t wait to see this one and the obligatory crowdfunding appeal (this time using London’s Phundee) kicking off in mid-April.

I horde books on sports footwear for both work and my personal curiosity. Some are good. Most are wasted opportunities. Largely it’s down to the writer not knowing anything about the subject matter and covering what a cursory Google search would yield, or a lack of any cultural context and academic approach. As somebody whose vision of brands and their output is completely clouded by years of obsession, I’d love to read something that really told the history of the performance shoe from the beginning to the billion pound industry we see today. I’d go nuts for a 128 page book on the history of designer brands and their forays into sportswear to be honest. I know I’ll end up grabbing Out of the Box: the Rise of Sneaker Culture, which releases via Rizzoli this July for completists sake, but I’m expecting something a little better than the same old same, because shoes have been shot from Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum (where the original Out of the Box exhibition ran from April 2013 until June last year), the objects on display date back to the 1800s and it promises some all-important (provided you didn’t sign up to look at the same set of Jordans and Yeezys that everyone owns). As the writer of the best book on this topic ever, Bobbito Garcia knows and Elizabeth Semmelhack knows about footwear to a scholarly degree. As obnoxious as the cover is, it seems like a fair reflection of the horrible state of things right now.