I learned a very valuable lesson when I wore an actual full Burberry cheque flat cap into a pound pint Glasgow boozer a few years back. It was 2006 or so and the Burberry cheque was still *kind of* acceptable thanks to football casual culture. I should have known better though.
Despite my thick Manc accent, a gaggle of lads at the pool table proceeded to yell at me about how fucking stupid I looked, with one very nice guy kindly pointing out that I was “dressed like a right southern wanker.” I spent the rest of my trip storing my cap in my hotel room. Flash-forward to today and that’ll forever be lesson number one of my British street style anthropology course. The United Kingdom is a small island.
Literally, you can drive from coast to coast in less than a day. For fuck’s sake.
And yet, our street style varies so wildly by city that you can usually tell where someone’s from before they even open their mouth.
Sure there are obvious stereotypes regarding north vs south, but dig into any of our major cities and you’ll find serious style tribes that are worn as proudly as the clubs on your accent say you support. Wear one of those tribes’ outfits in another city and holy shit do they notice. It’s like wearing Hawaiian shirts in Glasgow.
Over the years I’ve spent many a weekend traversing Britain’s biggest cities taking meticulous notes on exactly how regional peacocking works around these parts. Armed with a trusty notebook and verbal abuse from actual anthropologists who think I live inside ten football terraces, I’ve watched as style codes have changed, developed, and remained steadfast through rain, shine, and those 8 minutes of sunshine we Brits enjoy each year. What I’ve discovered after a decade of people watching up and down this country is that British street style is far from homogenous.
In fact, it varies wildly from city to city. So let’s explore the differences… Lets start at the centre, purely because Londoners will always think that absolutely everything originated from the capital.
London street style has long been characterised by it’s segmentation into niche-as-fuck micro scenes, each with it’s own particular rules and standards to adhere to. Hackney-started hipsters in vintage carpenter trousers and **TOE RIPPED** off thousand pound Stan Smiths. Kensington mum dressed as her boredballer kid wearing a Barbour jacket she likely got for Christmas and suede Loakes.
Peckham-based art students rocking Refuge stuff with OG Visvim they found in some Japanese dudes basement. Central or uptown bankers in hideously tailored suits with sockless ankles for purposes I’ll never understand. The one true consistency in all of London street style though is that nobody wears anything remotely casual.
Hell, some people probably don’t even own casual clothes. Even if you’re wearing what appears to be a plain white t-shirt and some boots, there’s always homework involved. Somebody somewhere knows that your t-shirt was from a tiny micro brand that only has 422 followers on IG.
And those boots? Stitched together by THAT FUCKING JOSEPH ALTUZARRA and handagedded by the cobbler he took with him when he left Margiela. I spent a week popping between Soho, Shoreditch and Dalston last autumn solely to study the citizens of London.
I’ll start with the silhouettes. Skinny jeans are no more. London has fully embraced an oversized silhouette.
Wide leg trousers are swooshing around over boots, chunky knitwear is drowning teenagers and no jacket looks like it actually fits the guy wearing it. It’s a halfway house between London crushing the life out of 90’s style hip-hop/rave wear, Japanese aesthetic and the increasing mainstream reach of high-fashion tailoring. You’ll see guys wearing baggy jeans with blazers now.
Stuff that would have been worn exclusively with either skin tight jeans or offizi shorts just a few years ago. I saw bankers from Lombard street wearing the exact same trousers as artists shaking down their washing machines in Hackney, they were just wearing different shoes. The subcultures definitely still exist in London but they’re overlapping more than ever before.
London also likes to largely wear black, navy and grey. Despite writers like myself periodically shouting about the new colourful London look you’ll struggle to find much evidence of it outside of the pages of Dazed. Backpack was laden down with black when I ambled around Soho on a Tuesday night last October.
Don’t get me wrong, colour is used as accents; think crazy beanie, mad socks or statement bag worn with an otherwise monochrome outfit. London pushes its colourful outfits about as far as North London/North-East London-neutral (thanks for that percent). Where you’ll see the juice squeezed in London is with accessories.
Nobody does shit they seen on the latest YSS runway quite like a Londoner. The city’s obsession with one-upmanship bleeds heavily into whether your Japanese tote bag is from a brand thats been DEAD for the last decade, whether your vintage Rolex Submariner was actually worn by Fergie or if you personally hand carved your Gucci leather keyring from an endangered tree while listening to Sleaford Mods at London Vintage Córd. My people call that mental flexing.
Manchester streetwear has always played by it’s own rules and that’ll never change. Ask anyone who grew up in Manchester and I can guarantee they’ll tell you that our city has never liked being told what to wear by anyone, let alone our stylistic oppressors down south. Take a weekend stroll through The Northern Quarter, Ancoats or Deansgate and you’ll start to notice a few things that remain steadfast no matter what silly season we’re currently in.
Most Manchester style is aggressively not soft. Our street style has always been a form of armour, partly due to our endless winters and partly down to life in the north generally being more aggressive than elsewhere. There’s an edge to everything that gets worn around these parts.
It might be softened with aviator shades and an overcoat but there’s still an undeniable hardness to how we dress. Colour wise things also tend to stay on the darker side; rich burgundy, forest green, olive and midnight blue trump primaries and pastels 90% of the time. While Londoners like to show off how studiously they’ve avoided looking too “done,” Manchester street style is equally as classless when it comes to wearing your wealth.
You Might Also Like
That battered looking jacket? That mop top hair? Those trainers with the frayed laces?
Nine times out of ten they were purchased that way. I saw one kid outside YES last year wearing what I think was a £500 Maharishi that had been expertly destroyed by whoever owns it, covering them up with Primark skinny jeans and a pair of Adidas Sambas he probably stole from his dad. Manchester also has some serious tribalism when it comes to streetwear that has remained consistent despite the ever evolving interwebs.
Indie kids in vintage Fred Perrys and straight leg Levi’s. Hip-Hop heads in oversized sports hoodies worn with limited edition Air Max trainers. Casuals with their divisive designer labels worn in increasingly specific ways that change yearly.
They might all exist in the same postcode nowadays, living in the same bars, clubs and houses but you’ll still know who’s who just by looking at them. What has changed over the last few years is sportswear’s relationship with anything smart. Gone are the days of Stone Island jackets paired with old college sweatpants and shitty knock-off Nike Air Force 1s.
Our beloved sportswear gets taken just as seriously as our trousers and jackets these days. It’s a city that’s always worn its Adidas jerseys with pride (lets all unofficially agree to adopt Adidas as Manchester’s uniform, k?) but these days everyone and their Mum is throwing tailor-fitted trousers with their Fear Of God hoodie. As sportswear continues to be taken increasingly seriously by high fashion our beloved streetwear brands have stepped their offerings up ten fold, blending the two worlds together until they’re one and the same.
Vintage also means something a bit different here compared to London. Whereas finding the OG version of a trend is common place for our capital, Mancunians care more about wearing original gear with actual history. That might mean; original Berghaus jackets from the 80s, proper old school fisherman jackets from our booming industrial heritage or first-run tracktops from brands with local significance.
These wins big points round these parts compared to your bag cheque Japanese designer that posted a pic on Instagram once. Ok now we come to my favourite. Glasgow.
Lets get one thing straight. Glaswegians have always ruled the street style world and been massively underrated for how legit they always look. I first started visiting Glasgow regularly for the AMAZING vintage scene around 8 years ago and stayed loyal because not many cities can make putting on a bin liner look cool…
Literally nobody. Glasgow street style has it’s own unique frequency. There’s no emulating London’s try-hard ren faire bullshit or wearing the wrong items in enough of a heap to believe you’ve got some sort of cultural cache like in Manchester.
Instead Glaswegians have cracked how to dress so unbelievably oddly that no one cares. I spent hours people watching on Buchanan Street and the Glasgow East End and struggled to put my finger on exactly what makes our neighbours to the west so great. Then it hit me: Confidence.
Glasgow street style is a breath of fresh air because it’s confident. There’s no deferring to trends or what’s cool, it’s just a bunch of people wearing cool as fuck shit and owning it. Texture is also a big thing here.Layering a see-through blouse under an oversized leather jacket and oversized ASICS Gel Walkers isn’t genius tailoring but it somehow works.
Hard textures worn with soft. Cheap with expensive. Mens with womens.
Gay with straight. It doesn’t matter what you throw on your back as long as you throw it on with conviction. Colour is also welcomed with open arms.
Forget London’s duped AF versiort of colour blocking. If you blink you’ll miss it. Glaswegians actually wear colour.
Brilliant blues, yellows, pinks and greens are bursting at the seems come December time.
It’s a city that doesn’t give a shit about adhering to normals so why should your outfit? The biggest applause-worthy moment I give to Glaswegians however is their obsession with vintage.
Don’t get me wrong London loves vintage too but what Glasgow lacks in selection compared to East London it makes up for ten fold in actual authenticity. Theres no pretentious “vintage” labels here selling you a 20 quid jacket that certainly didn’t come from theirestate in Essex. Instead charity shops are king around these parts with unbelievable selections at stores like Mr Ben and The Glasgow Vintage Co.
I’ve seen literally every lookbook-worthy vintage item I own on men walking the streets of Glasgow. Undistressed 1940s work jackets, Deadstock Moncler bags, Sugoi Down jackets from when everyone thought THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA…Glaswegians have pulled all of these off a rack and worn them with an ease that says they were bought from Tesco Metro. Glaswegians are also just better at dressing for this shit British weather than anyone else.
Trust me when I say that if you can look good wearing a waterproof jacket and still keep dry here, you’ll be drop dead handsome anywhere else. And the technical jacket game is strong here. Not just your Everypony Foundation layering pieces but genuine hardcore mountaineering gear and off-shore fisherman jackets you could probably live in.
Unlike in London where I’ll see immaculate North Face Venture jackets hanging off the backs of Primark trousers, in Glasgow a weatherbeaten Patagonia jacket coated in salt stains from said peoples weekly fish suppers is the norm.
