Fashion: Loving the Liverpool look

Mar 13 2008 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Johnson samples a new publication that celebrates Scousers‘ unique take on life and fashion

IF PROOF were ever needed that Liverpool doesn’t follow trends, it sets them, it came this week when British actress and style icon Sienna Miller was spotted out and about in her pyjamas.

And Miss Miller calls herself a fashion designer. Doesn’t she know we were doing that in Liverpool years ago?

Joking aside, Liverpool’s obsession with fashion is a long-standing one from the make do and mend post-war days, when curtains were transformed into prom dresses, to the affluent footballers’ wives-led looks of today, we have never been ones to miss a trend.

Whether it is the women dressing up in kaleidoscopic designer frocks and gargantuan hats for Ladies Day racing, or lads hanging around on street corners in their tracksuits, Merseysiders have never failed to make a statement.

This unrivalled fascination with fashion is examined in a new Liverpool Daily Post publication – The Liverpool Look, which chronicles the changing fashions in this city over the past six decades, from the New Look of the 1950s to the now infamous “Liverpool Look” of the 21st century.

“There very much is a Liverpool trademark look,” says celebrity stylist and leading fashionista Lorraine McCulloch. “Liverpool girls set out to get noticed. It is not a look that you see anywhere else. It is a very done look, very glamorous.

“Isabella Blow celebrated that on a national level, (she featured the city in society bible Tatler in 2003) she said ‘forget London, Paris and Rome it’s all happening in Liverpool’.

“She was the first person in fashion to notice it to that extent, but Luella Bartley (the designer) also celebrated Liverpool in Vogue.”

One thing is for certain, we can’t get enough of designer labels, a fascination that has now been fuelled by the opening of the Metquarter with its Flannels, Hugo Boss, Diesel and Armani stores, to name but a few.

“The girls love See by Chloe,” offers Lorraine. “Christian Louboutin shoes, Matthew Williamson and Biba are big too. Whereas Versace was massive in the 1980s and 90s, then Missoni at the turn of the century, now it is about Stella McCartney, Lanvin and Balenciaga.

“And the boys like their high fashion, too – Hugo Boss and Armani and Maharishi are still big, but now they love their Dior and Gucci, too.”

But, as the Liverpool Look also addresses, high fashion is not our only obsession here in Liverpool. From trainers to tracksuits, our ongoing love affair with sportswear is legendary and, as Dave Hewitson – author of Where D’Ya Get Yer Trainees From – explains, can be traced back to our other favourite obsession beginning with “f” – football.

Because, as Dave attests, the cult of the trainer kicked off – so to speak – on the Liverpool terraces, or more specifically at the Anfield Road end.

There, he explains, fans differentiated themselves from those on the Kop by wearing the latest Lois jeans and European trainers. Picky “terrace casuals” wouldn’t be seen dead, for example, in a scarf, since the European Cup success of 1977, and would mock their sartorially challenged fellow fans with derisory chants about “brown airwear” and three star jumpers.

“Following Liverpool would enable you to kill two birds with one stone, support the team and return with an array of goodies unavailable in the UK,” says Dave.

“1981 was a cup-winning year and on trips to Munich, Germany and Paris, France and friendlies in Germany and Switzerland you would see Scousers returning with Head bags full of Adidas, Fila, to wear themselves or sell on to friends.”

Turning up in trainers nobody else had, like the Nasa-designed Forest Hills, was a great feeling, reports Dave – a trick was to scuff them so you could make out you’d had them for a month.

Fans travelled up and down the country to get their trainers, even getting a cheap Transalpino ticket to snaffle a pair of Grand Prix trainers from Germany, before the Wade Smith brothers opened their Slater Street store and persuaded Adidas that selling their European models in Liverpool would be commercially viable.

In this most outspoken of cities, we have also never been afraid to make a political statement with our clothes as a trip to the punk days of the late 1970s and early 1980s reveals.

When many around the country were enjoying the wealth and Dynasty-led fashions of the 1980s, in Liverpool led by bands like Big in Japan featuring Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson, punk seemed a more fitting sartorial response to the riots, mass unemployment and militant council of the era.

Perhaps Lorraine McCullloch sums our fashion fascination up best.

“Liverpool is a city that is unashamedly joyous about music, fashion and football,” she offers.

“When people in Manchester and London were dressing down, in Liverpool we were dressing up. Girls in Liverpool follow high fashion not high street fashion, they wear what they want to wear and don’t give a damn about being cool.”

* The Liverpool Look – celebrating six decades of city style – is available now at newsagents, and from the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, on Old Hall Street, priced £1.50

emmajohnson@dailypost.co.uk