In quotes: Robert Elms
Roberts Elms is a journalist, author and broadcaster. The presenter of the lunchtime show on BBC London, his book on British youth fashion, The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads has been an Umbrella favourite since it was first published in 2005. Here he talks skinhead, casual and why youth culture has never recovered from rave.
A dapper young Robert
“I remember being chased around Sheffield in 1974. I had some pink pegs on”
“It’s around late ’67, spring ’68 when mod splits into two – that’s when skinhead begins. One lot, the art-school mods, go in the direction of hippie. But there’s a reaction to that: boys in Bethnal Green or Notting Hill don’t do hippie. And the only drug they take is light ale.”
“The first skinhead I saw was my brother Reggie. He came home with number-one crop and a razor parting. My mum went completely mad. In my mind’s eye, he’s wearing off-white sta-prest, a pair of brogues, a Ben Sherman button-down shirt and braces. Mum knew that this meant trouble. I looked at it and thought, ‘That’s all I ever want to be.’ I was nine or ten.”
“I remember going across London on four different buses to buy a trench coat, because that was the coat to have. Now you click a mouse.”
“Skins pared mod down to its absolute essentials: short hair and neat clothes. It’s a mix of Ivy League with working- class British totems: work boots and braces. It’s some of what their granddads wore and a bit of what the West Indian kids who shared their estates with wore – pork-pie hats, trousers worn a bit too high, red socks. It’s brutalism.”
“Euston Station on a Saturday morning in the 1970s was extraordinary. It was where the northerners arrived and the Londoners left from. It was the only place that Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham West Ham and Millwall would meet on a regular occasion. Then they’d go and fight each other.”
“I remember being chased around Sheffield in 1974. I had some pink pegs on.”
The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads
“Acid was the last hurrah because everyone was included. You can’t have elitist street fashion when everyone’s included”
“Skinhead was like the Berlin Wall. Once it was gone, that was it. A cabbie told me that there was a day in 1970 when you could hear the hair growing in Mile End.”
“Acid house is the last spasm of this story. I’m in the Wag club in Soho, wearing a Gaultier suit, Paul Smith shoes, some expensive shirt, probably Margaret Howell, drinking a bottle of imported lager. My mate Spike, a hairdresser, says to me, ‘We’ve got to go down to south London, there’s this really funny club with slum boys on E.’ It was Shoom. There was this line of people outside dressed in baggy, lilac clothing. We went in, and they were playing U2 mixed into some house thing. I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing, but it’s not for me. I’m going home.’”
“In terms of ‘casual’, I do remember seeing kids in the late 1970s, probably Liverpudlians, wearing what I’d call ‘pared-down soulboy’. It was that wedge haircut with Lois jeans. In its early incarnation, it wasn’t flash, it was more like neo-mod.”
“Acid was the last hurrah because everyone was included. You can’t have elitist street fashion when everyone’s included.”
“The tribalism has gone. A lot of the clothing was displaced violence. We live in a much more rational, sane and dull society. It’s more bourgeois. People go to restaurants. There were no restaurants when I was growing up.”