 is a book that takes the question: “what if the eighties was, like, a real, living person?” and runs with it for 399 pages. (Brett Easton Ellis won’t like that description, but then I’m beginning increasingly to suspect that Brett Easton Ellis doesn’t really like anything).

It huffs up all the decade’s power restaurants and rolodexes and videotapes, and all its money and certainty and vanity and cocaine, and pumps them it into a horrible, handsome, pin-striped little shell named Patrick Bateman, until he swells at the abs and sweats like a crack baby. And Patrick may or may not like to mutilate and murder a little between the sauna and the ceviche, and he may or may not be real, and he may or may not be imagining everything, and the book may or may not be endorsing this lifestyle, and it may or may not be condemning it, and it may or may not be saying something much cleverer in between the two.

But listen — you’re just here for the scene with the business cards and all that lovely Oliver Peoples eyewear, aren’t you, so let’s not get bogged down in the details. (There are also some bits with rats and prostitutes and chainsaws, but again, don’t worry about it, honestly, it’s fine.)

"Did the yuppies shape late eighties Wall Street, or did late eighties Wall Street shape the yuppies?"

It’s now exactly thirty years since the novel was released in the UK. With our woke glasses on (they’re probably not Oliver Peoples — sorry), we can now look back on its era of Reaganomics and power suits with a knowing, post-post modern shake of the head. How far we’ve come. How much we’ve learned. How little we now listen to Huey Lewis and the News.

Just think. A former celebrity as president! An unregulated financial market running rampant! An utter infatuation with brand names and the lives of celebrities! A cultural obsession with murderers! A feverish fixation on new restaurants! An unscalable mountain of urban cocaine! Who could live like that? These people! These monsters! Those vile bodies!

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sometimes life imitates art. Sometimes art imitates life. But sometimes we just imitate our former selves — and that’s when it gets really pleasing, especially for a gently exhausted lifestyle journalist with a Getty Images account and yes, fine, alright, sure, an abundance of Gucci loafers. So. What would Patrick Bateman look like today? What would he love and who would he kill? And why, more importantly, should you care?

Bateman was born in Long Island, New York, in October 1962 to wealthy parents. His father is probably dead and his mother is in a sanatorium. He went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, which is about as posh as schools get over there (co-ed, so it’s roughly analogous with a Marlborough, I’d say), then onto Harvard College and Harvard Business School, from which he graduated in 1986.

From the moment of his graduation, Bateman works at Pierce & Pierce (get it?) — an investment bank on Wall Street, where he is a Vice President who specialises in mergers and acquisitions. He has a private office and his own secretary, which ages the novel considerably.

It’s hard to know whether the yuppies shaped late eighties Wall Street or whether late eighties Wall Street shaped the yuppies. There is certainly something oddly 

about the time and place. You can easily and instantly picture the early mobile phones, the minimalist offices, the grey suits, the primitive computers, the big desks, the long lunches, the boardroom cocaine, the corporate limousines and the unfettered expense accounts. Concorde seems to tie in nicely with that vignette, and so does sushi, as well as all that sweeping financial de-regulation and explosive wealth. They called the bankers Masters of the Universe back then, which exaggerated things, but only slightly.

That image looks dated today, and the financiers only have themselves to blame. Something to do with 2007, I’m told (or didn’t you read 

?). You could argue that Wall Street investment banks still have inordinate power, and you’d certainly be right. But they’re no longer the biggest companies in the world, much less the accidental lifestyle brands they once were. The mystique and drama of that career has faded. Most bankers now work in open plan offices with banks of flickering monitors in greying shirts. Bonus is a dirty word. My friend at Schroders eats soup from Abokado at his desk, and commutes in Reebok Classics.

"The modern-day Bateman would fetishize LinkedIn invitations instead of business cards..."

No — If Bateman 2.0 was a modern day Master of the Universe, he would work in tech. Probably a venture-backed start up with big ambitions (and by big ambitions I mean hopes of being bought out by Facebook, then gutted and dissolved. See how quickly this stuff gets gruesome?) It would be called Piercr, or StabBox, or maybe Murdero. He would be a sales evangelist of sorts, or something in digital marketing. (I don’t know what a Growth Hacker is, but there’s something suitably abbatoiresque about it.) Perhaps he would have a title like Vice President of People. You don’t even need to make a “murder and executions”-style joke with that one. It’s ghastly enough on its own.

Bateman would take clients to Soho House White City (more on which later, I suspect) and would listen to 

on his Apple Airpod Pros while he commuted on a Dutch bicycle. There would be a matte black, 75cl, company branded Chilly’s bottle on his hot desk. And he would fetishize LinkedIn invitations instead of business cards. 

Look at that self-deprecating and overly-familiar opening. That subtly personalised appeal to ego. That knowing but friendly emoji. 

(“Something wrong, Patrick? You’re sweating?”)

(A side note: preppy pastiche clothing brand Rowing Blazers released a collection of corporate-style gym bags embroidered with the Pierce & Pierce insignia a couple of years ago. They sold out immediately. The only person I know that owns one works at Google.)

The true antagonist of American Psycho might well be Dorsia, the fashionable Manhattan restaurant with the impenetrable guestlist. Bateman perpetually struggles to secure a table here, and screams “try getting a reservation at Dorsia now, you stupid fucking bastard!” when he fillets Paul Allen with an axe. (In the book, he is taken to Dorsia for lunch by his younger brother, Sean, in a brutal moment of fraternal humiliation.). Dorsia is to Bateman what art school was to Hitler. Rejection can be a potent motivation for homicidal insanity.

(Interestingly, in 2012, a restaurant/club called Dorsia was opened in South Kensington, which was seen as the height of postmodern public school irony. It was kind of a members club but also kind of not, and didn’t last more than a couple of years. It wasn’t overly exclusive and you certainly wouldn’t murder anyone over it — more a sort of poserish rolling house party in a three-floored Georgian townhouse, with people from Made in Chelsea in the loos.)

Today the clinical, stand-offish power restaurants of the eighties have been replaced with knowingly wholesome affairs — often simple, rugged, one-dish restaurants, or serious places chef-patroned by a beguiling, often handsome young cook, or small plate-laden ethnic restaurants with miniscule glassware, or well-intentioned market vendors that have since become victims of their own success.

"The true antagonist of American Psycho might well be Dorsia, the Manhattan power restaurant with the impenetrable guestlist..."

The white tablecloths and silverware and carpets have gone, and been replaced by tighter, elbow-y, more cacophonous affairs with cupboards for bathrooms. You might struggle to get a reservation at these places, but that is largely because they don’t take reservations — you’ll have to queue up, like everyone else, or go away and drink pisco sours at the bar next door and wait for the person with the clipboard to text you at 10pm, by which time you’re far too drunk to enjoy the labneh anyway. Bateman 2.0 would know these daily changing menus back to front, insist on choosing the low intervention wine, and go into a cold-sweated rage when the waitress, crouching at the table side, asks his party whether they have “been here before.”

Some London restaurants that Bateman would name-drop (and these are all thoroughly good places, by the way, and in no way condemned by a psychopath’s endorsement): Gold, Brat, Gloria, Decimo, Orasay, Temper, Cornerstone, Hide. (All one-word titles, you’ll notice — I wonder if there’s something in that.)

In the book, Bateman is a member of the Harvard and Yale Club, which requires you to wear a jacket. Today, he would be a member of Soho House, which requires you to lie about working in media and own a Macbook Air. Soho House is an ideal vessel for Bateman’s scene-y obsessions and self-conscious sermonising, and it has now achieved the remarkable trick of being both utterly mainstream and sneerily aloof at the same time. He would drink picantes and those funny yellow negronis and be painfully aware of the influencer at the coffee table next to him, and stand up to his chest in the pool on Bank Holiday Mondays.

Once upon a time exercise made you healthy — but now it makes you interesting, too. Patrick Bateman’s early morning routine of crunches and skips is depicted as a dull drudgery and another symptom of his clinical vanity. Nowadays it would be something to build an entire personality around. (Or worse — and this is a quirk of consumerism that even Ellis didn’t anticipate — a 

What marks out 1980s Bateman as a sociopath would make 2020s Bateman a lifestyle personality (the two terms may yet prove to be interchangeable). This is one area where we have leapfrogged the hellishness of American Psycho. Head on to Instagram now and you’ll find entire oscillating armies of influencers, fitness models and lycra ambassadors who flex and jerk and giggle and cajole and pretend to eat more pizza than they really do. Their stated aim is to make you fitter, stronger, healthier. But usually they just make you feel a bit fat. This might be forgiven as it may well be accidental (though there is a certain evangelical glee around things like before and after photos). But what is unforgivable is the yawning, saccharine unoriginality. The same cod philosophical positivity. The same pale colour palettes and eerie whites. The same imported Scandi-lite aesthetic. The same desire to be liked at any cost. The same long, rambling, faux-confessional captions about gratitude and growth. The same stage-managed photographs and desperate bandwagon hopping — mental health here, our NHS there. You just know these people were terrible at sport at school.

 “So, a lot of you have been asking lately about my morning fitness routine…”

, they say. I can assure you, sincerely, that we have not.

"Once upon a time exercise made you healthy — but now it makes you interesting, too..."

If Patrick Bateman were alive today, he would study these figures obsessively. He would carry a foam roller on the tube and wear all black Nike sports kit and go to spin classes at places like Third Space and 1Rebel, where the neon lighting glints on the heaving mass of bodies in the half light, and the instructors rise up in clouds of lasers and dry ice like televangelists, and the house music is deafening, and the Australians have huge calves. He would wear a black backwards trucker cap and offer to support your core while you planked and have a large canteen of water with him at all times.

He would also take cocaine. Everyone did then, and everyone does now.

; Ralph Lauren 33. Rolex gets 26; Brooks Brothers 18; Bill Blass and Valentino 13 apiece; Hugo Boss 9 — and so on and so forth, in a silken cascade of Hermes and Zegna and Dior and Canali, until you’re down to the odd shout out for Luciano Soprani and Fratelli Rosetti. This is powersuited pomp and circumstance, in other words — tailoring as standard and couture for breakfast. (There is also a singular mention of something called ‘Carrick Anderson’, of which I can find absolutely no trace at all on the internet — so it 

 be high end). One of Ellis’s oft-missed jokes in the book is that, for all formality and the acutely-observed name drops (the author later said that 

 deserved a credit as source material), the final ensembles are often impossibly silly. In one passage it is implied that Bateman is wearing two ties at once, while another scene references a double-breasted shirt.

Things have become a great deal more casual since then. Men only really wear ties socially at weddings and Ascot. (These are overwhelmingly Hermes or Ferragamo numbers, in my experience, or at least Hermes and Ferragamo-ish ties made by jaunty British bands with fun animals on them that somehow save elephants in Africa. There are hockey club ties as well, I’m told, but I’m not sure we’ll spend much time on those).

"This is powersuited pomp and circumstance — tailoring as standard and couture for breakfast..."

In some workplaces (insurance, the auction houses, solicitors firms, hedge funds), the reigning outfit is now a navy, single-breasted suit with a white shirt and black Oxford shoes or leather penny loafers. But your average commuting man-about-town doesn’t much bother with suits anymore, probably favouring chinos and an open Oxford collar shirt instead. Braces and two-tone shirts — the eighties staples of downtown Manhattan— are reserved only for former Army officers and teenagers who watched 

 just before their sixth form prom. Pocket squares are for undertakers, Italians, and weddings in the Midlands.

On the whole, male yuppies now deal in what are termed “essentials” or “staples” — understated items with elevated price tags. White or neutral t-shirts (perhaps Japanese or British) are paired with clean-lined ‘sneakers’ (often Scandinavian) in muted suedes or white leather. These are accompanied by Uniqlo micro-puffers or “work shirts/ overshirts” (French or Scandinavian), with patch pockets big enough to hold a bottle of natural wine. In summer, this look can be leavened by a linen shirt in more exotic hues and sometimes no socks.

Rolexes still hold a special place in the heart of the male yuppie (and quite right too), but an Apple Watch is also nice because you can get Strava on it. Glasses are still overwhelmingly tortoiseshell, classical, and round-framed. The Patagonia fleece (sleeveless or otherwise) is perhaps the high watermark of this new smart-casual-practical aesthetic. It is adored by Silicon Valley VCs, Australians in Whole Foods, Green Park hedgies, Midtown frat boys and East London advertising creatives alike. It says sustainability, style, youth, maturity, practicality, creativity, understatement and brand awareness all at once, and is thus as sociopathic as any garment can be.

Bret Easton Ellis has described the murder and torture scenes in 

as “the hardest scenes I’ve ever had to write.” They were, he said, “incredibly upsetting” to put down on paper, “for obvious reasons.” There are scenes where people are nailed to the floor and their flesh chewed off; moments when dogs have their legs snapped; long stretches about making human flesh into meatloaf; overtures with chainsaws and hatchets; a terrible, terrible scene with a starved sewer rat and a funnel. Eighties Bateman prefers decadent, brash and raucous methods that match the thrusting arrogance of his decade. Now, I imagine, things would be subtler, more considered, more technical, perhaps — but no less grisly.

Bateman 2.0 would be a master of psychological mutilation. He would opt for character assassination as standard, with suicide as an optimum side effect. He would troll his victims using an ingenious mixture of virtue signalling, perceived grievances and ‘cancellation’ — and then gaslight them into a state of utter self doubt and desolation. It would start with Bateman’s workplace rival, Marcus, penning a small, innocuous blog on the company website about the new office furniture. Soon an offhand gag in the second paragraph about standing desks would be picked up by a handful of Bateman’s ghost accounts. “Don’t you think this is a little heightist?” they would begin, before seeding a series of passive-aggressive tweets that say things like: “another six foot+ male exploiting the patriarchy of long femurs [eyes rolling emoji]”. Soon enough, genuine adult humans with colourful hair would jump on the cause. “NOT surprised to learn today that the chief manufacturer of adjustable standing desks has a nephew who works as a Tory special advisor,” they’d say. “Don’t let anyone tell you that heightism isn’t an institutionalised construct, people.” An anonymous email would be sent to the company CEO saying that Marcus has made a joke at the office party about a step ladder, and could often be seen stretching aggressively after a long day. Someone would leave a pair of bloodied platform shoes in the kitchenette with the message “height is MURDER” on the tongue.

"Bateman 2.0 would opt for character assassination as standard, with suicide as an optimum side effect..."

Owen Jones would weigh in on the issue noisily in the small hours of the morning, and a Huffington Post blogger would link the rise of standing desks to the military industrial complex and the Qatari monarchy. Marcus would become an accidental poster child for heightism, and be swiftly endorsed by Breitbart and the incel network in the backwaters of the internet. It would become too much for the agency to ignore, especially after that campaign they worked on for that charity that one time. Marcus would lose his girlfriend and his job, and, at his tenderest moment, Bateman would be there to offer his support, and they’d head to a quiet rooftop bar for a consoling mezcal or four.

When Marcus’s body is discovered the next morning by a cleaner, it is so smashed up from the fall that they can only identify him from the signet ring on his left hand. “Height kills”, someone or other would joke, insensitively, in a nervous, drunken moment at the pub — and Bateman would narrow his eyes and nod and laugh, and the wheel would begin to turn again.

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