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ABSTRACT
This article 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 article 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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Casual’ is a catch-all term and is not how many early pioneers and adopters of this movement would refer to themselves. It was conceived and applied retrospectively when the culture came to the attention of the mainstream (read London-centric) press. Prior to this (and indeed afterwards) the titles used were various. Some were specific to a ‘mob’ or ‘crew’, such as scallies or scals in Liverpool or Perry Boys in Manchester. Others were terms used more generally, for example ‘dressers’ and ‘trendies’. And added to this were the plethora of crew or firm names specific to each club (for a comprehensive list of these see Redhead Citation2007). Whilst I acknowledge the difficulties that come with the use of the term ‘casual’, I shall continue to use it for the rest of this article because it is now a commonly understood form of shorthand.
2. It took London a number of years to develop their own version of casual style.
3. A cursory glance around the streets of my home town of Glasgow would be enough to convince most of this statement.
4. Of course, Bowie’s entire career could be considered an act of bricolage.
5. This company is now known as the Original Montgomery, after Field Marshal Montgomery, and still manufactures duffle coats, albeit a modified version of those originally commissioned.
6. The hairdresser responsible for Bowie’s haircut on the set TMWFT was Martin Samuel. However, the wedge style Bowie sports was not particularly ground-breaking. Versions of this haircut had been popular since the early twentieth century and, contemporaneous to Bowie, soul-boys and the American gymnast Dorothy Hamill had similar styles. Typical of Bowie’s cultural influence, for a period of time at the end of the 70s, the style became known as the Bowie wedge (York Citation1980).
7. The inspiration to cast Bowie came when Roeg saw him in the Alan Yentob documentary Cracked Actor (1975) which follows the musician on his Diamond Dogs Tour (Pegg 2016,1975). In it Bowie is charming and witty but also whip thin, fragile and not of this earth.
8. The origins of the term ‘boot boy’ lie in the late Victorian period when it was used to describe young boys from London’s East End, orphaned or destitute – and rescued by missions such as Dr Barnardo’s of Stepney Green – who were put to use, polishing and mending the boots of West End gentlemen (Cohen Citation1997). It was also used in reference to low ranking servants, who were expected to polish and care for a household’s footwear.
9. For a thorough biography of Low please see Wilcken Citation2017.
10. The cover for Station to Station (Citation1976) and a number of singles also feature stills from the film.
11. It is beyond the remit of this article, but the fluid notions of masculinity demonstrated by Bowie, the boot boys and the casuals are worthy of further consideration.
12. Thus subverting and conflating Virginia Wolf’s assertion in A Room of One’s Own that the values reflected in novels reflects those found in life. that ‘it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial”. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction’ (Woolf cited Hughes Citation2006, p. 2).
13. A defunct British department store.
14. The conference presentations took place at Fashion, the 84th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, 2–3 July 2015, Senate House, University of London; Textual Fashion, 8–10 July 2015, University of Brighton; and the David Bowie Interart/Text/Media, 22–24 September 2016, University of Lisbon. The lectures took place between 2013 and 2018 at Glasgow School of Art as part of various courses delivered to both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
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Notes on contributors
Mairi MacKenzie
Mairi MacKenzie is a fashion historian and curator based in Glasgow. She is Research Fellow in Fashion and Textiles at Glasgow School of Art, a visiting lecturer at Glasgow University and was an associate lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion. Mairi’s current research is concerned with the relationship between popular music and fashion; social histories of perfume; and the history of dressing up and going out in Glasgow. She is author of Dream Suits: The Wonderful World of Nudie Cohn (Lannoo, 2011), Isms: Understanding Fashion (A&C Black, 2009), and Perfume and Fantasy: Scent in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).