In a dubwise dance in a chic little gentrified corner of a North London ghetto, I get my dance on with my other post-Rasta sistren.

You can’t put a value on a few hours of freeness in Babylon-don, when a driving base can hit you hard in your chest like the biggest Maracas wave sneaking up on you.

Even in the dubwise dance there are the unenlightened yet unassailably cool that come in the form of curious rich white boys who have a yen for the exotic and can’t get enough of alternative spaces.

Are you from some kind of group, he asks me, while casting furtive glances at my headtie. And I know that he means cult, but he’s afraid to say the word. Afraid that he’ll put into words the questions I see in the eyes of people who stare at my wrapped up sistrens and me in a most un-English way.

In fact, he confides that it’s taken him at least two hours of intense staring and as much time being egged on by his friend for him to work up the courage to talk to me.

So I take another look around the room and analyse the hairdos of the other women in the dance. There are super-long weaves and super-short gelled spikes and cutesy Rastas tossing their designer dreads and a couple Goths with their jet black dead straight hair. It’s a typical London scene. And I guess he is right, we do look like royalty from another land. Which I am, I muse, I’ve just lost my kingdom. But my other two sistrens are as white as white and as English as Big Ben.

Because fashion is never actually about fashion and even a headtie makes a statement.

Even for an a-religious heathen like myself, young-ish and rooted in a Western fashion paradigm wearing a headtie is an unsettling thing for the mainstream.

Because Western fashion says it’s all supposed to hang out. We’re all about low-risers and push up bras and navel rings.

And nothing is wrong with any of those things per se but it’s a funny sort of conundrum fashion when the whole prevailing advertising capitalist lie says we’re supposed to all be individuals when everybody is actually striving to look the same, talk the same and drink the same horrible alco-pops.

But a headtie is a symbol of defiance that worries those who think they’ve finally got the feminist problem solved.

I’m not part of a cult. I subscribe to no Judeo-Christian notions of covering my head in deference to a man as a sign of my modesty or sanctity. As much as I reject the label Rasta, I reject the label feminist. Because both were created by someone else who didn’t really have me in mind when they created these boxes.

In a time when women allegedly have options, when sexual freedom and owning one’s body is a foregone conclusion, why would a woman choose to cover herself?

But this is also an era of fashion when a woman’s body is as much a battle ground uncovered as if it is shrouded in a burkah, my headtie is my defiance, my protection, my assurance that I get grudging respect, fear and loathing. It is the thing that defines my mood from warrior red to cool and deadly blue.

It is the thing that ensures that I do not fade into the grey lumpy mass of glassy eyed fashion followers who are so caught up in what being defined by someone else’s idea of what cool is.

It’s more than a little entertaining that people who don’t even notice the colours of the walls can spend their precious time trying to figure out what lies beneath my headtie.

There is mystery and mastery in being a woman. Defining and discovering understanding your sense of personal style is a major part of growing into womanhood.

For me it all starts with a piece of cloth.