Footballmania: the Subculture of Sportswear

i-Dentity

A group of football fans living in Liverpool in the late 1970s were destined to change men’s fashion forever. They were called the scallies and with their close Mancunian relatives the perries, they would eventually spread their sartorial standards all over the UK. These groups of football fans with a penchant for expensive European sportswear would come to be known collectively as ‘the casuals’. Back in the 1980s you might have thought that the casuals were simply a group of tracksuit-loving, thieving hooligans who travelled around the UK and Europe going to games, getting into scraps and robbing sportswear boutiques blind. But that’s not the whole story. The casuals shaped late-20th century menswear and changed men’s fashion forever. From the scallies and the perries; through to the Britpop phenomenon, then Metrosexuality, the term ‘terrace fashion’ can cover a lot of different separate cultures that existed between the late 1970s and 2000s, but two things bind them all together: football and fashion.

In this episode Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director at i-D speaks to Ollie Evans, vintage fashion dealer who runs Too Hot Ltd, about terrace culture’s working class stylistic origins. Turner Prize winning artist Mark Leckey describes his own relationship to football and the culture it fostered when the ‘casuals’ were at their peak. Editor-in-chief of CircleZeroEight Elgar Johnson explains how the metrosexual came to be, and Felicia Pennant of SEASON Zine describes how football’s relationship with fashion and gender is moving into a new, more intersectional era.

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