THE WAY WE WORE
The whistle was correct in every detail: petrol blue, wool and mohair. "It's all the go," said my mother, giving me an excuse to use the word "idiolectically" and show I'm not just an air-headed fashionista but an intellectual cultural commentator.
I've always loved clothes; even now I can't help admiring my row of handmade suits in their purpose-built closet. It's not an empty, narcissistic love, but one built on an appreciation of their emblematic significance in Marxist orthodoxy.
Everyone living in our working-class area of Notting Dale was a tasty geezer. We ducked; we dived; we bought clothes. We had a rugged proletarian attitude to money that produced an authentic style quite different from that of the effete middle classes.
I was just six when our working-class phone rang and I was told my dad had died. I was crushed by the sense that this great bear of a tasty geezer would never help me rearrange my wardrobe. Shortly afterwards our house was compulsorily purchased and we were relocated to Burnt Oak, another hard, uncompromisingly working-class area in north-west London and by the age of 10 I had adopted the skinhead uniform, though I later became concerned when it was appropriated by the far right.
My brother, Reggie, did some well-hard time inside, though he had to wear ill-fitting prison clothes, and I was left to carve my own way through the boutique of life. I developed an eclectic, working-class musical taste to match my dress sense, and I sneered at John Lennon. Imagine no possessions? What did Lennon know about the lumpenproletariat?
By the mid-70s the icy blast of working-class punk rebellion - far removed from the middle-class appropriation of New Wave - was cranked up to full mixed metaphors, and I was first in line to pay too much for bondage trousers. It was too much for the pseudo-socialists at the LSE, who couldn't cope with the realism of a genuine member of the working classes. While they worried about the pettiness of the three-day week, I was getting involved in the hardcore politics of the club scene.
On leaving the LSE, I became a music journalist; this was the frontline in the war against bourgeois oppression. Very quickly I became recognised as a figurehead for the New Romantics: I dreamed up the name for Spandau Ballet on a visit to East Germany and I still believe my article in the Face on the importance of vintage denim was instrumental in bringing down Thatcher.
My wardrobe grew even bigger than my ego as I got more famous. I became a TV star, went out with Sade and wrote a novel based on my life in clothes. And now that I fancy another suit, I've persuaded a publisher to give me an advance for rewriting it as autobiography.
The digested read ... digested
Lightweight? Suits you, sir
Monday April 25, 2005
The Guardian
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