Extract from Marshall‘s „A-Z of Skinwear“: An image that to this day remains one of the most striking of all the images youth cultures have developed. Levi‘s Denim jackets and jeans. Fred Perry sport shirts. Ben Sherman and Brutus shirts. Sta prest trousers. Two tone suits and crombie overcoats. And of course the item that above all others has come to symbolize the skinhead movement. The Doctor Marten Air Wear boot. The good old bovver boot. Everyone has either owned a pair of these boots or been on the receiving end of them“
.Today's most famous skinhead apparel, the pair of „Docs“, as Dr. Marten's Air Wear boots are usually called, virtually won the ´competition´ against army boots and National Coal Board miners boots, they were often worn one or two sizes too big, to support a martial look and heavy feel that was needed and feared. Not only style, but function made steel cap boots first choice as footwear, until they were declared „offensive weapons“ by authorities and banned from soccer stadiums. At times they were even delaced and/or confiscated until the rivaling fans were out of reach, which might have added to their mystification as the essential gear. It took a youth cult less than 5 years to turn their fathers‘ boots into a classified weapon.
Boots were, and still are, objects of fetishisation and narcisstic attention, since their aggressive appearance, combined with the ritual of preparation and showing off as a group embodies the skinhead approach to the outer world, thus the symbol has to be intensively taken care of. „Worn with Levi‘s jeans that were turned up to display the boots to their full menacing potential. By wearing their fathers’ boots, the skinheads made their pride in their working-class background public, first to rebel against the decency of the parents' generation, second to independently declare style to be a matter of individuality.
Gangs of inner cities‘hard mods, of whom the largest numbers were counted in London and Glasgow, had a more aggressive approach towards public appearance and eventually their opponents. They swapped their smart suits and expensive shoes for casual sportswear, jeans and boots, which served better for the regular ´aggro action´ and the notorious soccer trouble and street fights. To declare jeans an original borrowing from the field of labor would do injustice to the 50‘s cult of early rock‘n‘roll teddy boys, which first transformed blue denim into a leisure symbol of a youth cult, and thus completely suspending its original use. Nonetheless, the choice of jeans again hints at the semantically rather strict code of early skinhead fashion, demanding hard, but smart clothing. The parole of upcoming skinheads „to dress smart and hard“ thus reveals in how far their distinctive style was a functionalized patchwork of reaffirmed borrowings from the mods, and from the rude boys of the West Indian communities of Britain. Both subcultures drew their attraction from their latent violence and from their permanent rebellion against the parent culture and the majorities' culture by rearranging and transforming their symbols and clothes into one's own, and finally re-presenting them to the public in a manner which would not be accepted by the British majority.
.Compared to borrowed army or sports wear, labor gear was not associated with a special task or leisure activity, but with the inescapable economic basis, and the habitus of necessity of ones class. For outsiders it was hard to tell the source the clothing was borrowed from, because the 60s youth fashion heavily drew from pop music and its colorful and screaming approach to style and clothes. Thus their fashion could easily be distinguished from the dominant fashion. But in the skinheads‘case, there was less distance of original use and borrowed use. The exaggerated and subversive approach of mod fashion was taken back in favor of more decent, thus assimilating clothing, which was laden with symbolic power only when associated with the skinhead lifestyle.
West Indian music with its most popular offshoots ska, rock steady, reggae and blue beat was the main transmitter for the according culture of hoodlum and rude boy style to influence the founding developments of a distinct skinhead style. The subculture of immigrant youth was the only aspect of immigrant culture as a whole contributing to skinhead fashion, but nonetheless with strong effect. Mainly the bigger cities of Britain saw the immigrant youth dressed like the rude boy gangs of Kingston, whose style was then further condensed by the smart mod-fashion centered around suits, shortened trousers and polished shoes, often supported by shades and trilby hats. The fraction of mods turning into skinheads embraced the style which was staged by immigrant youth at the famous soul all-nighters, hoping that some of the backstreet and hoodlum flavor would rub off on them. But, the style was only partially adopted and therefore did not bear every facette of the original: in opposition to the West Indian immigrant kids‘, the skinheads‘ trousers were not handed down from their older brothers, but newly purchased, and thus had to be cut for the original look, which transformed a necessity into fashion. Aside from this borrowed look of poverty, wrap-around shades, worn at any time of day and at any location, symbolized the mythical power of the violent aspects of the Jamaican rude boy style, which probably was most important to British youth. What made the two subcultures mingle was the all-nighters and soul parties they both would attend. But before this happened, the immigrant youth had first to develop their own subculture that British youth found attractive and appealing.
Another mix was the upper and lower class influences. Blending the working-class based football and boxing-culture with upper-class leisure like tennis by wearing brands associated with either of them, skinhead culture again chose and assimilated clothing for reasons of style as well as for the impact of the semantic shift the clothing underwent as it was recontextualised. For example, Fred Perry, Britain‘s then most famous tennis player, lent his name to a range of tennis wear, which soon became popular among mods. Mainly the short-sleeved 4-button shirts, sporting the laurel wreath like all Perry clothes, turned into standard skinhead apparel, often chosen by their color schemes to match the favored football team‘s colors. By the time, all different cuts of skinhead clothing, like Harrington jackets, cardigans, button down shirts or vests soon became available also by the most popular brands Fred Perry, Ben Sherman and Lonsdale. Shirts by Ben Sherman were most popular among mods, which ultimately lead to company advertisements which read: "Ben Sherman was a Mod God". Ben Sherman not only indulged himself in mod life of party, speed and amphetamine, but also formed a crucial part of the mod‘s fashion. As the majority of early skinheads had very little connection to the habits of upper class leisure, Perry shirts, as well as Ben Sherman shirts, were chosen for their comparatively high quality and durability, but mainly for aesthetic reasons, since their button down collars served as ´counter style´ against the hippie-look of broad, floating flares and wide collars.
The same holds true for the straight and unspectacular (even when compared to their parent‘s clothing in the late 60s) style of boxing equipment by Lonsdale London Ex-professional boxer Bernard Hart opened his shop in 1960, but not until 1966 did his fashion become popular with the growing mod and rock‘n‘roll wave. Their customers, who mainly belonged to each of the youth cults, chose Lonsdale sweatshirts and vests. The close relatedness of sports and subculture becomes apparent if the WBA logo below might serve as symbol for some of the skinhead culture‘s principles: cooperation, which leads to uniformity and control.
Football colors, patches and team shirts did not only serve as symbols of pride, but also did they symbolize the commitment of the loyal supporters to a team, respectively to a sport itself and its principles. Hence, the choice of sports fashion fills the gap between the style-laden mod fashion and the function-laden and durable work apparel. The affection for sports like boxing or football, which are based on the seemingly authentic ´proletarian´ principles of competition, might stem from the two schemes of aggressive manhood and violent conflict solution inherent in skinhead culture from the very beginning.
The today infamous adoption of military apparel among skinheads can be regarded as functional choice, since most of the movement‘s followers were short of money and thus had to rely on durable and yet cheap clothing. The recession hitting on the lower working class from the mid 60s on forced parents to cut down the expenses provided for their children, and although youth always was the most affluent group of the British working class, compared to mod fashion skinhead apparel could be purchased at relatively low cost. Nonetheless, the importance of the symbolized, if not materialized aggression, together with the martial appearance of army clothing should not be underestimated as decisive factor for its growing popularity. Camouflage jackets and trousers and, mainly olive green flight jackets were popular among the young. Interestingly though, for reasons of style army clothing was mostly combined with a ´civil´ style. First, not to appear too clumsy, and second to avoid the impression of having a too strong affection for the military and royal system, or ambitions towards upper-class uniform appearance. Although the skinheads developed and defined a coherent uniform-like canon of hard dress, smart dress or casual dress, the congruence of original use and borrowed use of a fully fledged military outfit seems to have distracted them.
Unlike other youth cults, the early skinheads were at the same time extremely style-conscious, and yet tried to avoid all extraordinarity or too offensive appearance. The adopted sources youth culture, labor, immigrant culture, sports and military could have easily had provided a more shocking bricolage, but the working class background seems to have led to a down to earth style of nearly every day clothing, which was mainly chosen for function, and second for style. This difference, among others, probably made the skinheads emerge from the culture of mods and hard mods, and for the first time did a youth cult embrace the symbols of the parent generation without exaggeratingly altering or ironically distorting them, the combinations were at times unconventional, but never offensive, let alone subversive. It was the fame the skinheads earned for their ´aggro´ action by which their style acquired its violent and martial symbolism. Especially heavy steel capped boots until today are the main symbol for the cult, and the main requisite to be part of it.
Bibliography
Allen, Richard. The Complete Richard Allen - Volume One. Dunoon: S. T. Publishing, 1992
Griffiths, Marc. Boss Sounds - Classic Skinhead Reggae. Dunoon: S. T. Publishing, 1995
Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (Ed.) Resistance through Rituals. Birmingham: CCCS, 1976.
