Trust me, wearing trainers did not come from hip hop!

I read a suggestion recently that the fashion trend for wearing sports footwear, trainers and the like, or sneakers as the Americans call them, was pioneered by black hip hop musicians in the mid 1980s. A statement that I knew before completing the sentence was tosh. Indeed, I could potentially argue it's a form of cultural appropriation, because it was a well established trend at least a decade earlier in the UK among white football fans.

You can find any number of articles on 1970s and 1980s British football fan culture which refer to the "casual" look. Many of them credit Merseyside with a trend which I first noticed myself at Goodison Park in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

The classic three stripe adidas training shoe was part of the look but that wasn't really new, or specific to Liverpool. When I went to university in 1970 I soon dispensed with wearing formal shoes and opted for the trainers that were part of the post hippie "uniform" along with long hair (I already had that), cords (by 1971 I didn't even own a pair of denim jeans) and, for winter warmth, an army surplus greatcoat. Unfortunately I don't have a photo to do full justice to this vision of ultimate cool, but you can use your imagination I'm sure.

Indeed I can recall many schoolboys wearing what we called "bumper" boots - a UK version of baseball shoes - as casual footwear in the 1960s. I never liked them myself but some friends did and the style still persists.

 

Having left my early 20s behind, what I noticed a few years later on the terraces - and thought very weird - was that, along with much shorter hair, the younger element of the crowd had ditched wearing "colours" (i.e. scarves etc identifying their allegiance) and were wearing things like short sleeved Ben Sherman shirts. Whatever the time of year. And what always looked like brand new trainers. These youngsters were the early "casuals".

The look had the advantage, in an era of football hooliganism, of anonymity at way games, helping to avoid trouble (at least until you opened your mouth). The police would target skinheads wearing Doc Martens for special attention and were apparently more inclined to leave these smarter looking lads alone. Which was convenient, whether you were looking for trouble or trying to avoid it.

As fanzines became widespread in the late 80s and early 90s a generation of pre-blog era writers were inspired by Nick Hornby to share their experience of following their team. I read many nostalgic pieces in the Everton fanzine When Skies Are Grey by fans who would have been a decade or so younger than me about this era. Indeed, some editions of the mag seemed to be as much about fashion and music as football. 

Some people have gone on to make a career from it, one such being Jonny Owen, the film producer, actor and writer who first realised that he would prefer writing to working in the local Hotpoint factory when he left school and wrote some articles for his local team's fanzine, the grandly named Dial M for Merthyr*. Owen is also Mr Vicky McClure and a director of Nottingham Forest. In his column in the Sunday Times this week he writes about a chap from Blackburn called Gary Aspden.

Owen also has a slot on TalkSport radio. Despite having had guests like Liam Gallagher and Robert Plant on his show, the social media reaction to Aspden's appearance was as big as for any of Owen's broadcasts. This was because Aspden, who comes from Blackburn and is a Rovers fan, works for Adidas and is the man behind the Spezial range of trainers that has been so popular in recent years. Aspden had spotted the huge community of people obsessed with classic trainer styles, which isn't peculiar to Adidas. 

But in his Sunday Times column this week, titled rather pretentiously by the sub-editors Our trainers say so much about us - their effect on social history must not be ignored, Owen gives credit where it's due:

"it was Adidas where it began back in the late 1970s as Liverpudlians travelled Europe watching their dominant teams and bringing back exotic new sports wear"

You might scoff at "dominant" in Everton's case, though in the 15 years from 1975-6 to 1989-90 Merseyside teams won the league 12 times out of 15. Admittedly Everton only contributed two - and a European trophy in 1985**. Anyway, he contends that it was a Liverpool shop owner, Wade Smith, who noticed the trend for trainers on the Liverpool streets. Smith was a buyer for Topman. A third of all Topman's sales of Adidas came from the Liverpool store, so it wasn't that hard to spot. The most popular items were the Samba and the Stan Smith tennis hybrid.

Legend has it that Smith (Wade that is, not Stan) drove to Germany in a van and bought as many pairs as he could to set up his own shop. According to the Liverpool Echo the shop sold 110,000 pairs of Adidas trainers in the 1980s. Smith surfed a wave of brands, selling Fred Perry and Pringle jumpers and introducing exotic Italian brands like Sergio Tacchini in a strange fashion subculture centred on Liverpool. Casuals would make a pilgrimage to Smith's shop, which had moved to more elaborate premises on Matthew Street from its first location of Slater Street. Later on he went further upmarket, stocking Prada and Gucci. Oh those brand tart scousers!

I had a pair of Adidas trainers in the late 60s, which I'm fairly sure were Sambas. You can buy the "classic" style now: they look like this:

 

But were they being made that early, or is that yet another false memory of mine? The answer is that Adi Dassler's company first made them in 1949, to enable footballers to train on icy, hard ground. And playing football was what I used  mine for, at least till I went to uni.

Returning to Wade Smith, his shop closed in 2005 but here he is with a collection of his trainers:

As for "bringing back exotic new sports wear" one website dedicated to the casuals culture (Casually Bollocks - a history of the Football Casuals) claims a key moment was Liverpool's European Cup quarter final at St Etienne in 1977 when fans arrived back with an array of expensive French and Italian footwear "most of which they looted from stores". I prefer the Echo's take on this, that Liverpool and Everton fans came back from European jaunts with "holdalls crammed" with trainers. Apocryphal - indeed stereotypical - or not, the fascination with Adidas and Ben Shermans I had noticed diversified to include Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Lacoste, a brand I only ever saw worn in Liverpool for many years, as the Casuals branched out into polo shirts from their short sleeved Ben Shermans.

Indeed, I can recall a small shop full of younger punters on Lime Street in a scruffy block that used to obscure the station. A while back now the block was demolished to open up the station to the street and St George's Plateau:

The fact that the station was practically hidden often led visitors to have to ask directions though the sailor in uniform in the late 1960s who asked a bunch of fifteen year olds where Lime Street was must have noticed us smirk while telling him. (Lime Street was notoriously where the prostitutes touted for business). Although it wasn't Wade Smith's shop in that long gone eyesore block, I remember being puzzled by the stock of Ben Sherman short sleeved shirts and various branded polo shirts being on display in mid-winter.

 One can see from the reaction to Jonny Owen's interview with Aspden that the fondness for classic Adidas trainers runs deep in the males of the 60s, 70s and 80s generations, but particularly football fans. A trend that I believe stemmed from the uniform of scruffy students but was turned into a proper fashion style now widely credited to Merseyside football fans. Owen suggests the fashion spread because of football fans travelling way. Teams like Aberdeen met Liverpool, took back influences and made it into something of their own. The trend quickly spread down the M62 to Manchester. Many of Owen's compatriots in South Wales had "second" clubs, often from north west England, so the fashion was soon brought back to Wales and he says he spent most of the 1980s wearing three stripe Adidas trainers.

I was very fond of my Adidas trainers and boots in the 1960s, though when I was playing a lot in men's football, wearing boots out very quickly and spending my own money on them I was perfectly happy wearing the cheaper but functional Gola brand, especially playing at centre back. ("You might have Adidas on mate but I'm gonna tread on your toes and make them muddy"). And it wouldn't occur to me to wear trainers as a leisure shoe now, I'm happier wearing what we call sneakers than what the Americans call that. I'm not going to a lecture or to stand on the terraces, after all. This is my current favourite pair, from Dune:

As you can see they owe quite a lot to the Adidas training shoe in style. Though not as much as this slightly older pair of Pikolinos owe to running shoes:

Not that I'd like to run more than a few yards in them, mind. There are times when the greatcoat would come in useful in the winter round here though.

* Dial M for Merthyr is one of my favourite fanzine titles, though for me the ultimate has to be the Norwich fanzine Norfolk 'n' Good. As for me, the few articles I had published in When Skies Are Grey had no impact whatsoever on my career, though I keep meaning to republish the best of them here.

** But please don't spoil things by asking why the run ended when Everton were the best team in Europe - according to UEFA - in 1985.

P.S. Adolph "Adi" Dassler gave his name to his brand. His brother Rudolph worked with him but they fell out and so Rudi set up his own company, which in a flash of originality he called RuDa,  from the first syllables of his names. But after a bit he changed the name to Puma

Sources included:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adidas_Samba

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/nostalgia/wade-smiths-two-decades-shaping-20908798

http://casuallybollocks.blogspot.com/2013/05/history-of-football-casuals.html

Jonny Owen's Sunday Times column on 6 Feb 2022 (Our trainers say so much about us) and 1 Nov 2020 (The impact of fanzines on football cannot be overestimated)