Fear and Clothing in Adidas: Branded Sportswear and Fashioning the ‘Hard Man’

Turney, Joanne (2017) Fear and Clothing in Adidas: Branded Sportswear and Fashioning the ‘Hard Man’. In, Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance. 1 ed. London. I.B. Tauris. (Submitted)

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Football hooliganism, emerging in the 1970s, is largely seen as a British phenomenon, yet it arises in every country where football is played. As with all sporting activity, the concept of combat, of man against man (and football has been a predominantly male domain) is exerted, and victory over an opponent becomes an indicator of both prowess and power. For football fans, on pitch dominance spreads to and is sometimes surpassed by that on the terraces, and a group mentality and behaviour becomes an expression of power through aggression. In Britain, football spectatorship is performative; an indicator of the carnivalesque, chanting and face painting in order to dislodge social norms through ritual, but, in the 1980s, this developed into a style that centred on the re-appropriation of signs of class, wealth and power in order to articulate power and ‘hardness’. Here, power was obtained through subversion; both social and cultural norms are upturned, the ordinary became extra-ordinary and vice versa, and innocuous clothing invested with fear and violence.
The chapter aims to address the ways in clothing intended for organised sporting activity, was appropriated as leisurewear in the 1980s and redressed to accommodate informal street sports and football hooliganism. Considering the UK Casual subculture (also known as Scallies, Perry Boys, Tendies, and Dressers [Thornton, 2003]) themes will discuss the ways in which masculinity was performed through sartorial coding, how clothing became a ‘badge of honour’, as well as a sign of the ‘hooligan’ thus transforming innocuous garments into indicators of dominance and fear.
Testimony is drawn from the published memoirs of 1980s football hooligans and Casuals, which are now best-sellers. Glamorising acts of violence and branded clothing, these texts propose identification and objectification through consumption and behaviour, heightening a sense of what it is to be a ‘man’ then. Indeed, this period is considered as the birthplace of the ‘new man’, a construction developed in advertising and lifestyle magazines, and perpetuated with consumer goods such as cosmetics and skin care products.
From this it is necessary to contextualise football hooliganism in relation to its reach and consequences. Following the publication of the Popplewell Inquiry in 1985 into the Bradford football ground fire in which 56 people died and hundreds injured, the UK Government concluded that football hooligans were the number one enemy . This conclusion was compounded by the May 1985 explosion of violence at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium where Liverpool fans attacked rival Juventus supporters with makeshift weapons. After a wall collapsed, and riot police calmed the situation, 39 Italians and Belgians were dead (Popplewell, cf. McSmith, 2010; 275-6).

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