The Look goes on...

[Swampster]

Very tempting.

 

[cerneabbas]

There was a brief thing for the casuals* round here to wear Belstaff smocks. Perhaps it was the one-upmanship"" of the trend, similar in shape to cagoules but more expensive and harder to get. One of my friends badgered his parents to get one from him, but he was short for his age and it had an elasticated hood. He never wore it.
A short while later, we went on an outdoor adventure course, and the centre outfitted us all in the same Belstaff smocks.
I didn't ever buy my own, but I think I liked it enough to get a 60s cadet smock which was more of a student shabby equivalent.

*Football trendies seemed to be the local term.
**As an outsider, it seemed to be a trend driven by rarity and expense. I suppose lots of other trends are the same, but this was the one I was most aware of. I certainly couldn't understand the middle-aged golfer vibe.

There was a brilliant article in Modculture some time ago...'London boys' Gavin Henderson,the best thing that i have read about the late 70s and 80s from one lads viewpoint.
Although he was a 'revival mod' and later a Casual he says that Casuals were the equivalant to original Mods when it came to their attitude to clothes.
As you mention the one upmanship was a big thing for Casuals as it was for 60s Mods, tales of lads going to Italy and buying clothing that was unseen and unknown here.

I think that the golf jumpers (Pringle at first and later L&S too) were wanted as they were very expensive,also that look was far away from other lads looks at the time and part of the Casual idea was to move on and move away from 'punks,'revival skins','revival mods' etc.

 

[cerneabbas]

The funny thing is that although in the 80s Casual clothes were usually VERY expensive the present day offerings of '80s Casual clothing' seem quite reasonably priced.
Looking into it some of the clothes are now made in Vietnam etc etc,the knitwear is often cotton rather than wool.
Some of the styles seem only available from '80s CC'....I am guessing that they sell enough to order specially from the manufacturers.

tbh although i have lambswool jumpers I wear my cotton ones more,I find the Lambswool too warm especially inside buildings also the cotton ones wash better.

 

[cerneabbas]

Very tempting.

Shop around...they are always on offer somewhere.

 

[Thin White Duke]

From the mid eighties I used to go to this ‘alternative’ mostly post-punk / gothy club and the only casual I ever really saw in the flesh was a lad who would turn out every week in a Tachini trackie top, stacked jeans and blocky white trainers - possibly Fila Borgs? I had a low level admiration for him striking out on his own as nobody else I saw in Sunderland was into that look.

I understand a big influence for casuals was football fans who wanted to stay undef the radar of the police and who were influenced (eg Liverpool fans) on their away trips to Europe but my team never went near all that so we were largely ignorant of it all oop north. I think Robert Elms has something to say about all this in ‘The Way We Wore’.

I can see some parallels to original Mods in the one upmanship and pursuit of exclusive almost unobtainable gear but the end result doesn’t really compare for me. Taking one strand of that there was a lad used to come on here and tried hard to push his ‘urban rambler’ look but in the end I had to call him out on it and say his pictures of hiking boots, brightly coloured fleeces and cagoules had absolutely zero connection to anything remotely in the Mod cannon. (It didn’t help that he had long hair and jobstopper tatts all over his neck!😁)

There’s some crossover with more traditional casuals in the polo / jeans / trainers look as worn by some Mods when dressed down - including me. I’ve accumulated a few pairs of adidas classics but I’m not arsed about them being exclusive I’ve bought them purely on the basis of liking the colours and matching them up with gear I have.

I always thought Cagoules were purely utilitarian and not remotely cool. My Mam bought me a Peter Storm one (came with a little enamel badge) when I must have been about ten years old as we often went in holiday to the Yorkshire dales and it was always pissing down!

 

[Swampster]

There was a brilliant article in Modculture some time ago...'London boys' Gavin Henderson,the best thing that i have read about the late 70s and 80s from one lads viewpoint.

I've just given it a read. Interesting stuff. The effect of inter-factional violence clearly had an impact.
I'm surprised that he said the media didn't seem to notice the 'designer hooliganism' until 1984. Even an outsider like me noticed the pretty sudden change in late 81/early 82. Seemed like a lot of the kids who had been 'mods', skins' etc suddenly had longer hair and sported more knitwear.
We were only 14/15, so not exactly hardcore. It was coincidental for my age group that the people I knew were just starting to get a bit more money in their pocket, even if it was from part-time work at 16. I 'm sure at least a few also acquired the bravado to help themselves from the rails. I could never understand the crocodile razor harvesting though - I'd have thought that being found to have created your own Lacoste would be worse than not having one. Or was there a status in having acquired a trophy?

 

[Swampster]

I can see some parallels to original Mods in the one upmanship and pursuit of exclusive almost unobtainable gear but the end result doesn’t really compare for me.

I suppose all fashions have their point where being unique becomes the aim, either through rarity or novelty, rather than because the look is something you actually like. Or even if you do like it, it isn't something you want to wear more than a couple of times. There was a brief thing for leg-warmers which I think was a Manchester thing which had filtered down to us. Once it ceased being a novelty, it soon disappeared. The whole thing of mocking someone for wearing something which you had yourself worn a couple of months earlier is something I wouldn't really have got my head around.

It's another of the things which Elms mentions every now and then, like when he spent ages putting together a US army uniform.

 

[Thin White Duke]

It’s been a while since I read Elms’ book. On the one hand it’s an interesting first hand account of someone who was right in the middle of a very eclectic and dynamic scene, but I couldn’t help having a bit of disdain for the fact that he seemed to jump on every single bandwagon going no matter how wacky, so I sorta questioned his commitment to any one particular look as he was forever in search of the next shiny object fashion-wise.

 

[Swampster]

I think he is a classic of wanting the novelty but wanting to move on when a style was no longer novel and/or has become mainstream.
"There was a certain pleasure in witnessing people leap from tight snow-washed denim jeans to flowing robes, but not enough to compensate for the fact that your scene is being sold wholesale."

His description of his New Romantic days appears on the surface to satisfy that urge for constant novelty, but there is perhaps a sterility in that chaos just as much as following hidebound rules (I seem to be paraphrasing Michael Moorcock). There is a big difference between "I want to wear this because it is new and I like it" and "I can't wear this because it is old even though I like it".

Once NR became mainstream, Elms says that he reacted by wearing lots of suits, though with something of a 40s vibe.
To be fair to him, he does acknowledge that he was prone to flitting from style to style.

 

[cerneabbas]

There was a brief thing for the casuals* round here to wear Belstaff smocks. Perhaps it was the one-upmanship"" of the trend, similar in shape to cagoules but more expensive and harder to get. One of my friends badgered his parents to get one from him, but he was short for his age and it had an elasticated hood. He never wore it.
A short while later, we went on an outdoor adventure course, and the centre outfitted us all in the same Belstaff smocks.
I didn't ever buy my own, but I think I liked it enough to get a 60s cadet smock which was more of a student shabby equivalent.

*Football trendies seemed to be the local term.
**As an outsider, it seemed to be a trend driven by rarity and expense. I suppose lots of other trends are the same, but this was the one I was most aware of. I certainly couldn't understand the middle-aged golfer vibe.

I found these copies on Ebay for £70....the originals go for a lot more...

 

[cerneabbas]

I think he is a classic of wanting the novelty but wanting to move on when a style was no longer novel and/or has become mainstream.
"There was a certain pleasure in witnessing people leap from tight snow-washed denim jeans to flowing robes, but not enough to compensate for the fact that your scene is being sold wholesale."

His description of his New Romantic days appears on the surface to satisfy that urge for constant novelty, but there is perhaps a sterility in that chaos just as much as following hidebound rules (I seem to be paraphrasing Michael Moorcock). There is a big difference between "I want to wear this because it is new and I like it" and "I can't wear this because it is old even though I like it".

Once NR became mainstream, Elms says that he reacted by wearing lots of suits, though with something of a 40s vibe.
To be fair to him, he does acknowledge that he was prone to flitting from style to style.

The bloke in the Modculture article says the same about the revival 'mod' scene in London and later about the Casual scene...more fun before the media and the masses found out about it.

 

[cerneabbas]

From 80s CC....I can remember the younger brother of a girlfriend in the 80s wearing a jumper something like this but yellow and white (and maybe light blue ) he had a wedge haircut and later a perm with shaved back...his (gorgeous) girlfriend was a hairdresser....
I remember them going to the golf club shop to buy Pringle jumpers....and his girlfriend being told off for parking in the presidents parking space.

 

[Swampster]

I found these copies on Ebay for £70....the originals go for a lot more...

Mine was from an Army and Navy in 1984. I suppose they;d have been pretty common then. I mostly bought it when I found out how much it rained in Plymouth.

 

[cerneabbas]

Mine was from an Army and Navy in 1984. I suppose they;d have been pretty common then. I mostly bought it when I found out how much it rained in Plymouth.

I never had one,they are cotton were they very rainproof ?

Yes Plymouth not far from Dartmoor or Bodmin moor (I have had soakings at both) as they were used for army exercises I am still surprised that the clothing worn in the Falklands war was so poor for the conditions.

 

[Swampster]

It had some kind of waterproofing, so did its job. Not as sweaty as an NBC smock, though less useful if the balloon goes up.
Meteorology students at Plymouth told me the air would dump moisture on Plymouth as it rose over one moor or the other, circle round, pick up more water vapour from the sea, dump it on Plymouth and so on.
Wettest city in southern England and not much behind Leeds/Bradford.