In a way, it can be just the way fashions change over the decades. Different colours come in and out of fashion as time passes. Darker colours to tend to be worn in the Winter months.
However, we are a nation of scruffy buggers these days which has nothing to do with fashions changing.
Here’s a photo from a Millwall v City FA Cup game at the Den in the 1930s:
Wherever I saved it from at the time said this picture was City fans in the away end, but I can’t say for sure. But everyone is dressed in suits, with clean shoes, trench coats and you can see one fella with a trilby and you can just make out a flat cap/baker boy cap on the head of another fella… but most probably had some smart headwear on.
Fashion was
much better back then. Although, it will still have been mostly people wearing black, greys and browns. But that didn’t matter because those colours still looked good as the clothes were good and men, even poor men, had class and style.
Could you imagine what our great grandfathers would make of what people wear these days? Doing ‘Casual’ (capital C) properly is a good look but it’s still nowhere near as classy as a century ago. However, the nation took ‘Casual’ and cheapened it and took it further by not just wearing casual attire and sportswear labels, but actually wearing exercise-wear out in public. It wouldn’t cross my mind to go to the pub or the football in a pair of tracksuit bottoms and dirty scuffed up trainers, I wouldn’t even go into someone’s house dressed like that doing a job like fitting a bathroom or painting+decorating (I’d feel like I was being disrespectful dressing down so much)… but loads of people wear that stuff in public these days. And they often accompany the scruffy trackies and trainers with those smelly puffer jackets where the filling of the jackets holds in sweat and over time smells like Kevin Sinfield’s socks probably do at the end of his 7x7 fund raising runs.
Here’s my Great Grandad (right) and his brothers from my Mother’s side of the family, and these were by no means posh men, they were Polish immigrants who lived in Cheetham Hill. Photo from the 1920s or 30s, not sure.
I remember seeing Canadian comedian, Tom Stade, and he opened his show saying ‘When I first came to this country and was astonished at how healthy you all were. Everyone on their way to or from the gym, or out and about exercising and going for jogs, everyone was wearing a tracksuit. I thought “fair play, they take their health seriously in this country”. Little did I know that nobody was on the way to or from the gym and those running around were shoplifters running away from the scene of their crime. You guys aren’t serious about your health, you just all wear tracksuits and you do it unironically’.
He had us down to a tee!
