“Those great social levellers” Children, fashion, and class

A major fashion trend of the 1980s and 1990s was colourful sportswear, including sweatshirts, jogging suits, and of course, trainers. According to news, although parents were tempted to buy these affordable shoes, they were also worried that their children preferred these mass produced, comfortable shoes to “proper,” hand-made, good quality leather footwear. Daily Mail even published a piece to reassure worried parents that it was acceptable for their children to wear trainers. But the line was drawn there. It was one thing that children, as not-yet-complete people wore trainers, and another when adults who were supposed to grow out of them did. “Adults have got into the act as well. They are even to be seen in most offices. One West End shoe buyer told me, with a shudder of horror, that on his rush-hour train he constantly finds himself gazing at young City gents in pinstriped suits … and trainer shoes” noted the piece.

Adults’ fashion choices became more of a focus as more and more adults wore shell suits and tracksuits in bright colours. “Outside the school gates in fashionable London neighbourhoods (…) the mothers sport punk rock hair-dos and wear electric blue playsuits” observed Mary Kenny in her piece on “the slaying of childhood.” According to Lesley Garner, “inhabitants of the new childhood look more like mini adults, but that is because new parents like to dress like children (…) See the family in the park in their brightly coloured jogging suits, anoraks, and those great social levellers, trainers.” Several commentators agreed that levelling on the same fashion style was another blow to the boundaries between children and grown-ups. “The levelling qualities of socialism are nothing compared to the levelling power of the market economy, which has made adults and children appear to converge in a common, almost indistinguishable culture” wrote Jeremy Seabrook for the Sunday Telegraph.

However, the problem was not simply that children and adults looked alike, but also that adults from different classes did. As pointed out by Katherine Appleford, British newspapers used clothes and fashion as codes to establish class identities. It was understandable when these lines were crossed by children, who were assigned a lower social status than adults. It certainly was not acceptable for the new middle classes to adopt lower class tastes and fashions. It was not a coincidence that all those adults that were criticized in these texts were obviously middle class; they were fathers and mothers from fashionable London neighbourhoods, City gents, and families in parks. When they chose to wear the unofficial uniform of underclass “chavs,” they were not only crossing child-adult boundaries, but defying an evolutionary view of social distinction which placed the adult white upper class male at the top of the pyramid.

Quoted news:

Mary Kenny. “The slaying of childhood.” Daily Mail, 18 March 1983.
Jeremy Seabrook. “Child abuse and the loss of innocence.” Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 1987.
Lesley Garner. “Innocence under siege.” Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1986.
Barbara Griggs. “Trainer mania!” Daily Mail, 15 December 1981.

More on class, culture, and consumption:

Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn (eds). Class and Contemporary British Culture. Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2013.
Katherine Appleford. “Fashion and class evaluations,” in Black, De la Haye, Entwistle, Root, Rocamora, and Thomas (eds). The Handbook of Fashion Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 102-120.
Keith Hayward and Majid Yar. “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass,” in Crime, Media, Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, April 2006, pp. 9–28.

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