Football, Fashion and Unpopular Culture

This one-day conference will coincide with the exhibition Invisible Men: An anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive, a major exhibition exploring menswear from the beginning of the 20th century to the current day. The exhibition will feature over 170 garments and will be the largest menswear exhibition to have taken place in the UK. Both in museums of the decorative arts or dedicated fashion museums, menswear, and the history of menswear are significantly underrepresented. Despite the explosion in fashion exhibitions over the last 45 years, menswear is still comparatively marginalised or excluded from the history of dress. Its inclusion often framed only in the well-worn tropes of the ‘dandy’ or ‘peacock’. Why has menswear been ignored for so long? Why is menswear absent from the museums of fashion and the decorative arts? What is it about the aesthetics and design process of menswear that makes it resistant to investigation in comparison to womenswear? The speakers featured in this conference will examine these issues and propose new ways of interpreting and framing menswear that addresses its fundamental differences in design processes that makes it distinct from womenswear. Speakers include: • Professor Alistair O’Neill, Central Saint Martins • Professor Jonathan Faiers, Winchester School of Art • Dr Jeffrey Horsley, London College of Fashion • Professor Andrew Groves, University of Westminster • Dr Danielle Sprecher, University of Westminster • Dr Shaun Cole, Winchester School of Art • Ben Whyman, London College of Fashion • Mairi MacKenzie, Glasgow School of Art • Nick Sellars, Northumbria University • Joe Hunter and Adam Thorpe, Vexed Generation The conference will explore key themes concerning the exhibition, including: • Expressions of working-class identity within British menswear • Beyond the dandy and the peacock • Representation of menswear in British Art: from Hockney to Lecky • The invisible codes of British menswear • Manufacturing authenticity in menswear design • The future of exhibiting Menswear in museums and costume collections Abstract for My Paper; This paper examines the influence of an outfit worn by David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and on the cover of Low, upon the earliest football casuals – those of Liverpool FC from 1976–79. The significance of this outfit, a seemingly unremarkable duffle coat, is drawn out in order to demonstrate the nuanced rituals, acts and structures that make fashion a set of practices and social relations as well as a culturally loaded object. This case study demonstrates Bowie’s transmedial flow between film, music, sporting arenas, fiction and television interviews and his related contribution to the transference and creation of fashion cultures in a pre-digital age. It considers the value and shortcomings of subcultural studies when trying to understand a culture that is not one’s own, as well as the marginalization of casuals within analyses of subcultures generally. This paper builds a methodological framework that draws upon theories of costume in film, fashion in fiction and existing research on working class dandyism and football culture. Representations of this outfit in the work of author Kevin Sampson – an ‘active participant’ in these new cultures – are analysed to demonstrate the role that clothing and emulation play in the relationship between a performer and their audience