There’s an argument over who started the global sportswear fetish, but I beg to differ. There’s no argument; it surfaced in northwest England in the late 1970s, having developed underground for long before that. But how did it begin? If you have 300 seconds to spare, I will tell you.
In early-70s Manchester, Northern Soul’s Modish disciples took to wearing Fred Perry polo shirts while dancing their brains out on amphetamine sulphate in the Northern Capital’s myriad clubs. These places were primeval; dance-floors pulsating with a collective accelerated biochemistry like a mass of quivering, stroboscopic protoplasm. The Manchester Northern Soul crowd were among the first to utilise a branding logo – the Fred Perry laurel wreath – which earned them the nickname “Perry Boys” (as opposed to the simpler “Soul Boys” in London and Liverpool). The Perry was matched with narrow cords and long-sleeved polo shirts or baggy chunky knit cardigans that reeked of opulence. On the feet went boat shoes and gym pumps. Their sartorial diet was a rare one, but they were made of the right stuff, and being made of the right stuff was most important. They performed unprecedented break-dance gymnastics in their underground havens, modelling the latest gear from Europe like a colony of luminescent microbes consuming but forced to remain a small population, hemmed in by useless materials like bri-nylon, crimplene, and acrylic. In other words, total shit for peasants. The original Perry Boys wore classic wedge hairstyles; huge fringes cut back at geometric angles perpendicular to their foreheads, parallel to their cheekbones, up over their ears toward a layered pile protruding backwards like a spinning top, energy-fed by the impulsive flicking of the fringe. The physicality of the dancing demanded well-cut clothes, preferably ones designed for swift directional change and arm swinging while retaining an essence of style.
This is where tennis came in. The Perries discovered sportswear for its dance-ability above all else, but as the 70s progressed, and their little brothers modelled replica Man United kits in the streets, two rivers of fashion coalesced and overflowed like a stream swarming with varicoloured specimens. Perry, Admiral, and Umbro were products of brand marketing, a strategy that the Soul- and footy-crazed Manc youth had no genetic resistance to; those specimens were hooked. Football kits were red or blue (with the odd interesting away strip causing a sensation) but Perry transcended terrace tribalism via multiple colourways. Though dovetailed to music more than football, Perry Boys enjoyed apex predator status in Manchester clubs. Perries equalled danger, the polo shirts, and girl’s haircuts functioning as a warning to would-be prey. Northern Soul gave way to Punk and New Wave between 1976 and 1978, and a hybrid species emerged from the sediment. The decomposition and riverine transport of previous life-forms is what provides fertile ground with its nutrients, and the global sportswear fetish has Manchester’s Perry Boys and replica football kits as its Tigris and Euphrates, the former being the originators, the latter the messengers.
When Adidas t-shirts and Kick training shoes first trickled across the Channel around 1978, the novelty of football-type sportswear not exclusively red or blue dawned in Manchester. But it is impossible to escape the grip of football in that city; however gay and fashion-conscious and addicted to club-life you are, football’s manic shadow will engulf and own you, like a black hole in black fabric. It’s a black thing, Soul, and when football and Soul collide, evolution is inevitable; Mancs spurned the ridiculous Punk fashions, preferring a hybrid sport and casual look, and by mid-1979 an army of baby bruvvers had transplanted the culture into the clamour of the football terraces via the grooves trammelled by Inter-City. Where the Mancs favoured plain but well-made textiles, Liverpool’s post-Punk scallies had donned big sasquatch jumpers, drainpipe jeans, and sandals, cos it looked cool and casual. Punk was too London for them. The scruffy, spiky Punk do spawned wild wedge variations on the electric Soul boy template. Underground clubs held secrets, but rampaging mobs of hundreds of kids wearing windswept wedge hairstyles and continental street- and sportswear cannot be ignored. And so the message was transmitted.
Adidas was the answer and Bowie and Roxy Music provided the soundtrack. But what did these creatures call themselves? Mancunians in the know in 1979 recognised Perries when they saw them, and the question “Anyone for Perry Boys?” was answered in the affirmative. But they were only half-right. It was a Nameless Thing, borne of disparate fragments that drifted together amid the chaos and ooze of late-70s natural selection. Natural selection is a non-random process. This was no accident; we knew what we liked, we liked how it made us feel, and animals whose pelt was the wrong design or material went extinct.
Compared to neighbouring Liverpool, Manchester’s gothic and industrial architecture looked brooding and oppressed, with a distinct lack of arabesques and other unnecessaries: Manchester cinemas and nightclubs resembled factories, and an underground record label cleverly adopted this camouflaged approach. Its sooty protagonists prowled Piccadilly Gardens like peppered moths, fusing with the Stanley-knife wielding Nameless Thing bouncing along in formation, becoming half hipster-half tennis icon. Music, fashion, and football hooliganism was an old trident, but this version turned Manchester’s credibility spotlight on in a new way.
In 1980, Scousers already had the superficial luxury of a national identity, plus physically beautiful buildings. Their chirpy accent lodged firmly in the popular imagination right next to the cockney sparrer, courtesy of four fab mopheads. In contrast, Mancs constructed an inner cityscape based on their collective architectural dissatisfaction. Man United were absolute wank, and Liverpool rampant in European campaigns. Addiction to labels and logos ripped through the primal northwest maze, and word had it that on the continent lay the mother lode; vastly superior forms spat out by the sexy design engines of Lacoste, Fila, Diadora, and Mr. Dassler himself. Scousers obtained the continental labels avidly on their football trips. It was no contest. On paper. Fortunately we are not discussing paper; the original Perries had made it one-nil to Manchester back in the early-70s, but things had shifted upward in scale. By 1980 the two rivers were two cities. One city had a reputation for technological discoveries and the other had produced a pop group. Pop culture had evaded Manchester thus far, but the city rapidly self-organised, with myriad shops substituting their entire stock for expensive sportswear from France, Italy, and Germany. From 1978 to 1979 Liverpudlians underwent their evolution from post-Punk electric Soul Boy variants to polo-shirted wedgeheads, and their travelling contingent was pure Nameless Thing. They totally outnumbered Mancs by early-1980, making it 1-1, but the game was by no means finished. Scousers now had two choices for fashion sources; travel to the continent or risky trips into Manchester, where growing hordes of predatory local taxmen waited, ears well-tuned to the Liverpool accent. Football became a fashion-based duality; teams from the northwest, and teams from elsewhere in the country. The former provided infinitely more excitement than the latter. Manchester’s retail manoeuvre created a bigger Nameless Thing population than Liverpool. And it was two-one before John Lennon was cold.
As we enter injury time (there were plenty on both sides), there is much scrambling and time-wasting. Manchester’s music scene, fuelled by ex and current disciples of The Nameless Thing, has led people to believe we really did invent casual culture. But Scousers claim absolute credit for the global designer fetish – citing 1977 as the beginning – and are quick to reference Robert Wade Smith as a pioneer of Adidas footwear when he opened his store in Liverpool. Alas, Wade-Smith’s Adidas store opened in 1982, years after the fact. Ironically, it is Wade Smith who delivers the knock-out blow to Liverpool, with the sales statistic for the Stan Smith, often referred to as the first shoe of the casual era. The Adidas Stan Smith sold a “phenomenal 2,000 pairs in the run-up to Christmas, 1979” in Liverpool, according to Wade Smith, the exact same period in which Kevin Sampson’s book Awaydays is set. Coincidence? 1977? I think not. So, it’s 3-1 to Manchester, which, funnily enough, was always my favourite footy score.
