British street style: skinheads

Few British subcultures have been as misinterpreted as Skins. A youth movement that emerged out of the Mod scene and was inspired by West Indian hair styles, it is now overshadowed by the extremist political views of some of its members. Christopher Raymond Brocklebank explores the origins of Skins.

Skinheads have long been misunderstood. This subculture’s perceived links to far-right politics have somewhat soured their contribution to vintage style. To make claims for it is to hit a cultural nerve and be laid open to accusations of filtering out noxious ideologies in order to concentrate on aesthetics.

However, things are rarely as black and white as they seem, if you’ll pardon the expression, and while there were undoubtedly factions of racist and violent Skins – those who were afraid of everything and worked overtime pretending they were afraid of nothing – there were legions of other Skins whose way of life was a celebration not of whiteness, but of roots; they were working-class with class.

The original Sixties Skins morphed out of the Mod scene. For Mods whose means were as slender as their silhouettes, petrol-blue Italian mohair suits were out, but Sta-prest, button-down Brutus shirts and steel-capped leather boots (shiny enough for a modette to stare into and make up her Ace Face) were in. The template for this approximated look was the dockyard worker’s uniform and with a few tweaks and some painstaking attention to detail, it was sharp, clean and tough enough to be seen in during an amphetamine-fuelled evening of skanking to blue beat, ska and soul in the racially mixed and harmonious dancehalls of south-west London.

By and by, like ice floes in the spring, these Mods (‘Hard Mods’) split from their peacock-like brethren (‘Smooth Mods’). By now, the latter wore their aspiration tonsorially by adopting hairstyles that spoke of leisured grooming while the former went to the other extreme with a clipped head that spoke of practicality, manual work, and self-assurance.

This style, the original Skinhead crop, was inspired by the young West Indian men they danced beside. These Rude Boys kept their wiry, unruly and coarse locks under strict control by keeping one step ahead of the razor. From this cut Skinheads would receive their new name come the fag-end of that most mythologized decade.

 

 

 

 

 

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