A few weeks ago I was trolling round the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, enjoying the tribal gathering. Matthew Slotover, one of the organisers, described it as a “Glastonbury for contemporary art” and it has a festival atmosphere. It's in a tent but without the mud or noise, an altogether more civilised affair — more Christie’s than crusties.

I was rapping with a journalist from The Art Newspaper about the event and he, in an attempt perhaps to provoke me into some outpouring of subversive bohemian bile, asked if I thought the whole thing — with its money and celebs — has become part of the Establishment. I replied without thinking: “Well, the Establishment is the new underground.”

Afterwards I mused on what I had said and where the thought had come from.

When I was a teenager and a desperate wannabe punk I was fired by the idea that we, the working-class yoof, were a fount of creative energy. Spontaneous expressions just burst out of us, provoked by feeling excluded from mainstream culture and needing to make a statement in an art-form that reflected our attitudes and values. We were sticking two fingers up at “the System”. Ooh, get her.

It was all gloriously amateurish and heartfelt, a mass outsider art that smelt genuinely fresh, like teen spirit I imagine. I was part of the venerable youthnic lineage of teddy boys, mods, rockers and skinheads. After punk I raided charity shops and the make-up box and the pouting panto that was New Romanticism minced into view under the beguiled gaze of a new sort of media.

The Face and i-D were born, designer journals that were hungry for the sartorial eccentricities of checkout girls in Sheffield and football fans in Lacoste as well as those of poncy art students. They would go on to document, as well as contribute to, the professionalisation of youth fashion and culture. Over the next 20 years these magazines matured and advertised posher and posher products. Youth no longer brewed their own outfits in dancehalls and backstreet tailors, they bought in to the hermetic sterile language of brands.

Suddenly I realised that it was nigh on impossible for a youth subculture to flourish unmolested by a posse of journalists still in thrall to the “cool” boys who smoked and answered back. Any flowering of creativity would be reported, analysed and deconstructed within an inch of its life by a cultural studies graduate wanting to carve a name in the burgeoning field of style media.

The other day I picked up a book called Fruits, by Shoichi Aoki. It’s a series of photographs of exotically and exquisitely dressed youths on the streets of Tokyo, amazingly varied ensembles influenced by Western youth cults, manga, sci-fi and my favourites, the Gothic Lolitas.

I can’t remember when it was that I started to miss seeing flamboyantly attired youngsters on our own streets. Maybe it was the circles I used to move in, but I remember encountering on a regular basis people rigged out so as to provoke tirades from every building site or passing van. Nowadays I rarely see anyone dressed to excess in the streets. It’s just a dispiriting parade of sportswear worn for CCTV and the lowest common denominator fashion dictated by Heat magazine.

If fashion is a street-level manifestation of what’s going on in society, the only counter in this culture is at Topshop.

Maybe today’s innovators have realised that there is little point in putting a lot of effort into being an embittered outsider youth rebel out to impress a few friends at some esoteric club. Perhaps they have come to the conclusion, as did Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their book, The Rebel Sell, that subversion and counterculture were always a vital part of the consumer system and that The Man needs weirdo kids who can coolhunt and brainstorm and bluesky to supply product to a market addicted to newness and “credibility”.

So maybe there is no underground any more, and all the clever creative youth are fed up with being ripped off and, having joined the Establishment, are making a mint doing their thing in a boardroom presentation rather than the playground.

After my day at the fair I head off to plug in to the Establishment. Wearing my most arty dress, made for me by a Korean fashion student, I’m still at it at the age of 45, still the same wannabe punk rebel out to have a little uneasy mischief.

But I’ve not traipsed off to some underground hellhole nightclub. I’m supping champagne and canapés at the US Ambassador’s residence, getting on famously with the cultural attaché and wondering what do I do now, now that

I’m in?