The zipped-up collar of an adidas track-top. The faded tan-wall tyres of a Stinger BMX. The baggy sleeves of an oversized Reebok sweatshirt. Scuffed loafers. Washed denim. Burgundy windbreakers and zig-zag patterned jumpers. You don’t need to look at Rob Bremner’s photographs of Liverpool and Merseyside for long to start to notice the details.
His full-colour medium format slide photos captured the often-overlooked in extreme precision—preserving everything from the number of bricks on the wall of a terrace house to the exact shade of red on the lettering of a Kwik-Save carrier bag. The past is often warped, misremembered or straight-up lied about, but his photographs show things how they were—or at least how they were for 1/250th of a second on a street corner in Everton.
From the mid-80s up to the early 2000s his wandering camera caught the ever-changing uniform of the Liverpool youth as it evolved from Marco Polo jumpers and straight legged Levi’s to Berghaus jackets and shellsuits, capturing the genesis of scouse style in the process.
While the 1980s as shown by the media was supposedly all shoulder pads and Sloan Rangers, the reality of what people were wearing in the north of England was scarcely documented. Damon Grant on Brookside just about had it down, as did Billy and Icky in One Summer with their cobbled together mix of denim, golf jumpers and adidas trainers—but they were rare exceptions, which is why Bremner’s photos are so valuable.
This wasn’t Bread, this was street wear before Streetwear—a true grass-roots style decided not by moodboards and meetings, but by the kids themselves. A wild combination of sportswear, outdoor gear and casual clothing recontextualised and reappropriated far from its original purpose, taken without consent from brands who had no idea what was going on (and in most cases still don’t).
“In 1976 fashion in Liverpool was changing,” says Dave Hewitson, founder of 80s Casuals and the writer behind terrace culture tome The Liverpool Boys are in Town. As a teenager in Liverpool in the 1980s, he saw the evolution of this unique style first-hand—not just as an observer, but as a keen participant in this new phenomenon.
“Teenagers had started wearing narrow jeans, Fred Perry polos and maybe a Ben Sherman shirt, but what made Liverpool teenagers stand out more than anything else was the black and white adidas trainers—Samba, Mamba or Bamba. Why the kids in Liverpool suddenly took it upon themselves to do this is open to debate but it became integral to ‘the look’.”
While it’s easy to think of the scally thing as insular, the style was actually anything but—soaking up details from anywhere and everywhere to create something entirely new. Liverpool’s location (and maritime history) might go some way to explain this, as Hewitson explains.
“Liverpool is a place that seems to stand alone at the end of the M62 looking out towards the ocean and far horizons with its back to the rest of the country. Our forefathers went to sea as soon as they left school. They would bring back moccasins, jeans and Italian suits unavailable in this country, and those tales of adventures to unknown lands would be passed down to us. Maybe a seed was planted and as soon as we were old enough to travel abroad on our own, we ventured to see Liverpool FC on foreign soil?”
The combination of LFC’s European Cup domination and cheap rail tickets was a strong lure for the new generation of explorers—and like all good adventures, there was treasure at the end of the trail… swanky European sportswear, the kind of which had never been seen in England before. The fact that German sports shops liked to display their rare wares on un-supervised racks out front meant it’d be rude not to grab a few souvenirs.
“It was in Europe where casual culture took a gigantic leap as there were many new sights to behold, such as row upon row of brightly coloured training shoes and tracksuits that would make us stand out even more once we returned home. A feeling of pride would ensue if you got your hands on a pair of adidas before your mates. Britain was in recession and was described as being in black and white, but now a slice of technicolour would find its way back to these shores.”
In a world of brick dust, bus-stops and flat-roof pubs, this luxury performance sportswear was a window into the future—the clothing equivalent of driving a Formula 1 car down a red terraced street. The fact it never stayed still only added to the excitement—with new ingredients constantly being added into the petri dish.
Punk. Football. Bowie. Star Wars. Farah slacks. Seve Ballesteros’s bowl-cut. Bjorn Borg’s zip-up Fila track-top. Every week the outfit shifted as a new influence was thrown in the mix. “The 80s saw many brands come to the fore in Liverpool. It is said with jest that jeans would be ‘in’ for one week and ‘out’ the next but this is almost true.” says Hewitson.
“Fashion was changing at a fast pace, so in order to keep up you had to constantly be on the lookout for the latest thing, whether that be the jeans or a Benetton rugby top or a Fila ski jumper. Many brands had a spell in the spotlight including Sergio Tacchini, Ellesse, Berghaus, Patrick, Peter Storm, Slazenger and Pringle, all in the first three or four years of the 80s.
A similar thing was going on elsewhere. Paddle down the ship canal to Salford and you had the ‘scruff’ in semi-flared cords and flat-soled adidas (already a dressed-down reaction to the luxury sportswear thing), while an early article on the ‘casual’ phenomenon in an 1983 issue of The Face showed a few grainy black and white photos of West Ham fans in Wanstead Park with a similar love for Lyle and Scott knitwear and Lacoste polos.
Zoom out a fair bit further, and you could draw parallels with Milan’s Paninaro and their penchant for expensive outdoor garb and western-wear, or the B-Boys of New York coveting the basketball shoes worn by their heroes on the court. But still, something was different in Liverpool—and unlike other subcultures who were often only very minor ripples against the mainstream, the tight clanism of Liverpool meant that once it took hold, it did it in a big way.”
Nigel Lawson, Oi Polloi founder and long-time label obsessive, was up the Mersey at the time in Stockport, witnessing the phenomenon from 40 miles away. “I think the difference from Manchester and Liverpool was that Manchester Perry boys had a kind of harder-to-define style—there wasn’t one specific look—but with Liverpool scallies there was a hierarchy there—if you didn’t stick to the rules, you weren’t involved. They all became obsessed with this one look—which was a lot tighter and regimented.”
Wade Smith should probably be mentioned here. Whereas some sports shops around the North West had seen which way the wind was blowing and started to stock the right brands for the young label-hunters, Robert Wade Smith’s shop can probably lay claim for the title of the first place to sell sportswear without even pretending it was for sport, opening his legendary Slater Street shop in 1982.
Rather than go through adidas’s UK distributors with their toned-down range of trainers, Wade Smith went straight to the source—following the route of the football fans by heading to Germany to find the kind of holy-grail rarities his customers hankered for.
“I remember going to Wade Smith when I started college in Liverpool, and it was stunning,” says Lawson. “It had a whole wall of trainers—but whereas when I’d go to Ron Hill’s Running Wild in Hyde they’d all be running shoes—in Wade Smith he had Trim Trabb, all the tennis shoes and all the scally shoes that people wanted.”
Like the Ivy Shop—the infamous London shop which flogged soft-shouldered jackets and button-down shirts to working-class mods in the ‘60s—Wade Smith sold super-expensive luxury gear designed for middle-aged bank managers straight to kids on a paper round. Lawson puts it down to that age-old thing of north-western contrarianism…
“Chic mention it in one of their tracks—they say, ‘I want to live the sporting life.’ If you’ve got enough money that you’re just playing tennis and golf and you don’t need to work, then you’ve smashed it. Forget suits—who wants suits when there’s really expensive Fila tracksuits? It’s two fingers up to the working life and being told what to do.”
Not everyone was lucky enough to get their hands on this stuff though. It’s easy to look back and list off the brands the kids dreamed of, but for every Fila or Tacchini, there were twenty market-stall versions vying for your mum’s hard-earned cash.
“Many parents couldn’t get hold of this new attire for their youngsters,” says Hewitson. “It was either coming back from Europe in the Head bags of young fashionistas, or it was too expensive, so they’d head to a local market stall who just so happened to have some cheap Walker tracksuits on their stall. Many young kids will forever be scarred for life for having worn a Walker tracksuit instead of a Sergio Tacchini.”
Outdoor gear played a big part too—especially by the late 80s as outerwear evolved from the humble Peter Storm cagoule to more technical (and covetable) Gore-Tex mountaineering parkas. The extreme price of these jackets meant they were hard to get, but still—there were always ways around.
“Supposedly the reason that Berghaus became a scally brand was that a big chunk of the north west’s stock—hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Berghaus gear—got stolen and then sold in the estates.” says Lawson. “These were jackets that were £200-300, and suddenly you’re getting them for £50.”
“It was there earlier—it was part of that luxury, expensive casual thing—but the reason Berghaus was everywhere later was because of that stolen shipment. Everybody had it, so all of a sudden everybody wanted it. There’s that photo of those two lads in the early 90s—one of them with a green shell suit and a dark royal Berghaus—and that was such a scouse look. I love that image—it’s maybe one of my favourite photos—it’s just a perfect look at the scally thing in the 90s.”
It’s not a surprise that Rob Bremner took that photo. Showing two lads about to tuck into a portion of chips in Anfield in 1996, it’s a prime document of how style in Liverpool had evolved since Rob’s early 80s shots. The building blocks of sportswear and outdoor gear were still present, but the silhouette had become baggier and more relaxed.
Looking at Bremner’s photos from the early 2000s you quickly see that things had moved on about five steps yet again. Just as his camera had changed—with a small and sneaky digital camera replacing the heavy Bronica medium format film camera he lugged around in the 80s and 90s—so too had the style he was documenting, with more polyester, more shorts and more trips to JD Sports. Things had come a long, long way—and while those who were there the first time around might have shook their heads at how things had changed, maybe that was the point?
More of an attitude than an outfit, this scouse thing has never been set in stone—always onto the next thing. From mod to scally to battery-powered Surrons and wheelie-bikes, ketwigs, John-eds, toothpaste green Montirex tracksuits and whatever else is down the road. The only constant is that it never stands still. Good thing Rob Bremner had the foresight to capture it.
Feature by Sam Waller for British Culture Achive
