In this commissioned feature for British Culture Archive, Sam Waller explores Rob Bremner’s photographs of Liverpool and Merseyside through the evolution of scouse style, casual culture and working-class youth identity from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
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 noticing the details.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
Bremner’s full-colour medium format slide photographs captured the often-overlooked with remarkable 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 mythologised, but his photographs show things as they were, or at least as they appeared for 1/250th of a second on a street corner in Everton.
From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, Bremner’s wandering camera recorded the ever-changing uniform of Liverpool youth as it shifted from Marco Polo jumpers and straight-legged Levi’s to Berghaus jackets and shellsuits, capturing the emergence and evolution of scouse style in the process.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
While the 1980s as shown by the media was supposedly all shoulder pads and Sloane Rangers, the reality of what people were wearing in the north of England was scarcely documented. Damon Grant in 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. This is why Bremner’s photographs are so valuable.
This wasn’t Bread. This was streetwear before streetwear, a true grass-roots style decided not by moodboards and meetings, but by the kids themselves. It was a wild combination of sportswear, outdoor gear and casual clothing, recontextualised and reappropriated far from its original purpose, taken from brands who had little idea what was going on and, in many cases, still don’t.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
“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, Hewitson saw the evolution of this unique style first-hand, not just as an observer, but as a keen participant in the 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’.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
While it is easy to think of the scally thing as insular, the style was anything but. It soaked up details from anywhere and everywhere to create something new. Liverpool’s location, and its maritime history, might go some way towards explaining this, as Hewitson suggests.
“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?”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
The combination of Liverpool FC’s European Cup domination and cheap rail tickets was a strong lure for a new generation of explorers. Like all good adventures, there was treasure at the end of the trail: European sportswear of a kind that had rarely been seen in England before. German sports shops often displayed their rare wares on unsupervised racks out front, and some of those pieces found their way back across the water.
“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.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
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 that it never stayed still only added to the excitement, with new ingredients constantly being added into the mix.
Punk. Football. Bowie. Star Wars. Farah slacks. Seve Ballesteros’s bowl cut. Björn Borg’s zip-up Fila track-top. Every week, the outfit shifted as a new influence was thrown in.
“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.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
“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 happening 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. An early article on the “casual” phenomenon in a 1983 issue of The Face showed a few grainy black-and-white photographs of West Ham fans in Wanstead Park with a similar love for Lyle & Scott knitwear and Lacoste polos.
Zoom out 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. Unlike other subcultures, which were often minor ripples against the mainstream, the tight clanism of Liverpool meant that once this look took hold, it did so in a big way.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
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.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
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 young label-hunters, Robert Wade Smith’s shop can probably lay claim to being the first place to sell sportswear without even pretending it was for sport. His legendary Slater Street shop opened in 1982.
Rather than going through adidas’s UK distributors and 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 sought-after 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 that sold soft-shouldered jackets and button-down shirts to working-class mods in the 1960s, 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. It is 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.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
Outdoor gear played a big part too, especially by the late 1980s, 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 it.
Lawson recalls a widely repeated story about how Berghaus became embedded in scally style.
“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.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
It is not a surprise that Rob Bremner took that photograph. Showing two lads about to tuck into a portion of chips in Anfield in 1996, it is a prime document of how style in Liverpool had evolved since Bremner’s early 1980s photographs. The building blocks of sportswear and outdoor gear were still present, but the silhouette had become baggier and more relaxed.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive
Looking at Bremner’s photographs from the early 2000s, you quickly see that things had moved on several steps yet again. Just as his camera had changed, with a small digital camera replacing the heavy Bronica medium format film camera he carried around in the 1980s and 1990s, so too had the style he was documenting. There was more polyester, more shorts and more trips to JD Sports. Things had come a long way, and while those who were there the first time around might have shaken 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. It has always been 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
