How Football Style Became Fashion: Casuals to the Terrace
From Liverpool lads coming home from Europe in sportswear nobody in Britain had seen, to football shirts on the Paris catwalk. The full fifty year arc of how terrace style became fashion, and the one rule the casuals lived by that blokecore forgot.
The European Raids: How the Terrace Discovered Fashion
Walk through any British city on a Saturday and you will see it everywhere. Retro football shirts worn with baggy denim. Adidas Sambas on every other pair of feet. Track jackets, bucket hats, terrace knitwear. Football style is no longer something you wear to the match. It is simply what people wear.
It took nearly fifty years to get here, and the story runs through some of the most inventive, contradictory and quietly influential youth culture Britain has ever produced. This is the full arc, from the boat to Rotterdam to the For You page.
Before the Casuals: Scarves, Rosettes and Boots
For most of the twentieth century, football fans dressed to be identified. Club colours, knitted scarves, rosettes pinned to overcoats. In the late sixties and seventies, the skinhead era brought boots, braces and a harder edge to the ends, but the principle held. You wore your allegiance where everyone could see it.
What happened next turned that principle inside out.
The European Raids: How the Terrace Discovered Fashion
The change began in the North West in the late seventies. Manchester had its Perry Boys, dressed in Fred Perry shirts and Adidas trainers with hair flicked just so. Liverpool had its scallies. Both scenes were moving in the same direction, but it was Europe that lit the fuse.
English clubs dominated the continent at the end of the decade. Between 1977 and 1984, English sides won the European Cup seven times out of eight. Thousands of young fans followed them out there, and they came home with more than programmes. They came home wearing labels barely anyone in Britain had seen. Lacoste. Sergio Tacchini. Fila. Ellesse. Kappa. Adidas trainers in colourways no British shop stocked.
Some of it was bought. A fair amount of it, by most honest accounts, was not. Either way, the effect on the terraces at home was electric. Lads who had never given fashion a thought were suddenly studying what the row in front had on their feet. Local entrepreneurs spotted the gap, with Liverpool shop owner Wade Smith famously driving vans to the continent and back loaded with rare trainers.
There were no lookbooks and no release calendars. The terrace itself was the catwalk, and word of mouth was the only media that mattered.
The Eighties: The Golden Age of the Casual
By the early eighties the look had a name, although the people wearing it rarely used it. The papers called them casuals. In Liverpool they were scallies, in Manchester Perry Boys, elsewhere simply dressers or the boys.
The wardrobe evolved fast. The continental sportswear of the early years gave way to a broader palette: Pringle and Lyle and Scott knitwear, Burberry and Aquascutum, straight leg jeans, and by the middle of the decade the Italian brands that would define the culture for good, Stone Island and CP Company. Regional variation was part of the game. Manchester brought back corduroy flares while Liverpool went baggy. The whole point was to be a step ahead of the lad next to you, and two steps ahead of the town you were visiting on Saturday.
It is easy to romanticise, and worth being honest. The casual scene grew up tangled with hooliganism, and the violence that shadowed it was real, culminating in the horror of Heysel in 1985. But reducing the casuals to hooliganism misses what made the culture matter. This was working class Britain, in the middle of recession and industrial collapse, producing one of the most sophisticated and self aware fashion movements the country has ever seen, entirely from the bottom up. No designer invented it. No magazine launched it. It came off the boat and up the terrace steps.
The First Rule of Terrace Style: Never Wear the Shirt
Here is the detail that matters most for everything that follows. The casuals did not wear football shirts.
Partly it was practical. Club colours marked you out to police and to rivals, and anonymity had its uses. But it was also the whole aesthetic point. Anyone could pull on a replica shirt. The casual look was a code, legible only to people who knew what they were looking at. Your allegiance was obvious from where you stood and who you stood with. It never needed to be printed on your chest.
Football style, in its original form, was about everything around the game rather than the game itself. The travel, the streets, the one upping of rivals, the Saturday ritual. Hold that thought.
The End of the Terraces
The world that produced the casuals did not survive the decade. Hillsborough in 1989 and the Taylor Report that followed swept away the standing ends, and with them the physical stage the culture had been performed on. At the same time acid house and the Madchester scene were pulling the same young men towards warehouses and fields instead of away ends. Bands like The Farm and the Stone Roses carried the casual silhouette into music, and the terraces quietly emptied of dressers.
The culture never died. It dispersed.
The Nineties: The Replica Shirt Takes Over
The nineties inverted everything. The Premier League arrived in 1992, football went glossy, and the replica shirt, the one garment no self respecting casual would ever have worn, became the biggest selling piece of clothing in the game. Euro 96 put football shirts on the whole country. Britpop put footballers and musicians in the same photographs. Football was suddenly mainstream culture, and its merchandise was mainstream clothing.
Terrace style proper went underground through this period, kept alive by the faithful, by fanzines and by the enduring loyalty to Stone Island and CP Company that never really left the ends.
From the Away End to the Catwalk
The next turn took everyone by surprise, including the people who had lived it. Through the 2010s, the brands of the casual era began surfacing in places that had nothing to do with football. Stone Island jackets appeared on rappers in New York and on Drake's Instagram. Streetwear labels started referencing kits and terraces. Then the luxury houses arrived: football shirts on the Balenciaga runway, Dior working with Paris Saint Germain, Stella McCartney designing for Arsenal Women.
A style born on the Anfield Road end and the boat train had become a global fashion reference, priced accordingly.
Blokecore: The Terrace Goes Viral
The final stage of the arc happened on TikTok, and the name came from America. In December 2021 a creator called Brandon Huntley posted a joke about the coming trend of dressing like a British bloke, and by the spring of 2022 blokecore was a genuine phenomenon: vintage football shirts, baggy jeans, Sambas, a pint in a plastic glass. The 2022 World Cup poured fuel on it, celebrities from Bella Hadid to Rihanna wore kits as streetwear, and the Samba became so ubiquitous it was practically legal tender.
Look closely, though, and the irony is glorious. Blokecore is built almost entirely on the replica shirt, the exact garment the original casuals defined themselves against. The style that began as a refusal to wear football clothing has been reincarnated, forty years later, as a celebration of nothing but football clothing. The old dressers had a word for people who went to the match in club colours, and it was not a compliment.
The Style Came Full Circle. The Meaning Did Not.
None of this is a complaint. Every subculture that survives long enough gets absorbed, reissued and worn by people who were not there, and football style has fared better than most. The shirts look good. The trainers were always good.
But the original idea is worth remembering, because it was better than a trend. The casuals understood something that blokecore, for all its charm, mostly does not. Football style was never really about the kit. It was about the world around the game: the streets you walked to get there, the stand you stood in, the Saturday itself. You could carry all of that with you and never once wear a crest.
Some of us still think that is the best way to wear the game.
Sponsored by the CobbleRose Shop.
