Parkas, bucket hats and union jacks: how the Oasis reunion tour is fuelling a comeback for the Britpop lookNEWS | 21 December 2024The great Oasis comeback doesn’t start until summer 2025 but model and influencer Thomas Meacock – a 23-year-old who delights his 700,000 followers with “blokecore” outfits and a 90s feathered hair style – already knows what he’s going to wear. “Straight black or indigo jeans, a sage Oakley parka, any old Adidas trainers and my mum’s Ray-Ban wraparound sunnies.” Basically, he says, he wants to stay “as close to Liam Gallagher from the D’You Know What I Mean? music video as possible”.
Meacock is not the only twentysomething thinking about his outfit and studying the fashions of the mid-1990s. The announcement of an Oasis reunion means Britpop style and its myriad references – from bucket hats and parkas to 1970s suiting – is being looked at again. Apparently, searches for “Oasis band” were up 105% on Pinterest the week the tour was announced.
View image in fullscreen Liam and Noel Gallagher in 1997. Photograph: Brian Rasic/Getty Images
Gianluca Cagliesi, 23, discovered the band’s debut single Supersonic in 2013 when he was at school and now runs the Instagram account Britpop Glory, which has 168,000 followers. “It’s impossible not to appreciate Liam Gallagher’s attitude, his moves and his style,” he says. “Thanks to him, I always wear Gazelles and Spezial.”
Lava La Rue is a 26-year-old musician who regularly uses Nia Archives, . which regularly displays the Union Jack – a Britpop favourite – in its imagery. She sees it as “reclaiming what is seen as a very colonial and oppressive flag”. Of British-Jamaican heritage, she doesn’t think parts of the establishment would “like to see someone like me adopting it, wearing it and claiming it”.
View image in fullscreen Lava La Rue in her Oasis meets Dumb & Dumber T-shirt. Photograph: Instagram/lavalarue
She loves Britpop but uses the style “with a sense of irony”. She has an Oasis T-shirt featuring the band’s logo and the two characters from Dumb & Dumber, one putting the other in a chokehold, a nod to the Gallagher brothers’ longtime feud. “Britpop men are known to take themselves so seriously.”While the Gallaghers loom large, other pop music names are on the moodboard for twentysomethings too. Cagliesi appreciates “the elegance of Damon Albarn and the apparent sloppiness of Richard Ashcroft”. There’s also Jarvis Cocker’s charity-shop chic, Elastica co-founder Justine Frischmann’s CBGBs’-worthy rock style, Sonya Madan’s gamine chic in Echobelly, the sharp-suited Menswear frontman Johnny Dean, Miki Berenyi’s crimson hair in Lush, and a young Lauren Laverne, unrecognisable in her punky 90s clubkid look for Kenickie.
View image in fullscreen Lauren Laverne, far left, and Kenickie bandmates in 1998. Photograph: Jill Douglas/Redferns
“The style was more diverse than you might think,” says Miranda Sawyer, who has recently written a book on Britpop, Uncommon People, which tells the story of the era in 20 songs. She says there are four looks to note. “I’m from just outside Manchester. Oasis and The Verve just dress like northern men. Pulp was a jumble-sale look, so you would have fake fur, girls in mini dresses, and boys in secondhand suits. Blur did this inverted English pop, Kinks-y, Quadrophenia look. The final one is PE. Not the shellsuit, because that was for the enemy, but outdoor gear and Adidas shoes.”
Sawyer points out that style was not top of the agenda for these bands. “I wore what I wore when I was a student,” confirms Louise Wener, the lead singer of Sleeper, the band known for hit singles such as What Do I Do Now?. “When we were signed, it wasn’t like, ‘Now we’ve got a record deal, let’s change up our look and start thinking about it.’ I just went to Camden Town and bought a leather jacket.”
View image in fullscreen Louise Wener, second left, and Sleeper bandmates, in 1996. Photograph: Jim Steinfeldt/Getty Images
Wener thinks the laissez-faire approach to clothing was what made it so appealing to fans – it was attainable. “Anyone could look like me, or Justine or Sonya or whoever – it wasn’t like trying to look like Dua Lipa,” she says. “It’s almost analogue fashion. It doesn’t feel curated. I think everyone is hyper-aware now, whereas there was a real casualness about that era.”
Part of this came down to the fact that most of these bands were shopping secondhand – in jumble sales and charity shops. In his book Good Pop, Bad Pop, Jarvis Cocker talks about his first-ever jumble-sale buy, a garish 70s shirt, as “the real beginning of the Pulp aesthetic”. Johnny Dean, the frontman of Menswear, was equally dedicated to finding treasure amongst trash, with sharp retro suiting his trademark look. “When I was 19 or 20 I lived in the deepest, darkest depths of Essex,” he remembers. “I knew every single charity shop within a five mile radius.”
View image in fullscreen Jarvis Cocker throwing (mis)shapes in charity shop chic, at Glastonbury in 1994. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
This also fed into the retro vibe of the Britpop aesthetic. “You would go around to somebody’s house, and they would have a 70s Space Hopper and a fluffy rug,” says Sawyer. “And that was the aesthetic —it was cheap and it was also comforting because it reminded you of your childhood.”
“It was a strange thing,” says Dean. “It was our generation paying homage to all these things that we’d grown up with … it was almost this fear of the future.”
Sixties Britain was particularly idolised whether through Blur’s love of The Kinks, or Oasis as fanboys of The Beatles. Anne-Marie Curtis, who was a fashion editor at Sky magazine at the time and worked on covers of Suede and Sleeper, remembers the time as happy but not edgy. “There was quite a lot of patriotism around,” she says. “The way it was super-British meant it was not that rebellious.”
For all of its implied rebellion, the tropes and imagery of Britpop could now read as cheesy and more than a bit retrograde. See Liam Gallagher and then-partner Patsy Kensit wrapped up in Union Jack sheets for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1997 or Noel at Downing Street toasting Cool Britannia in a smart suit. See also the “Battle of Britpop”, which saw the grown men in Blur and Oasis pitted against each other, Gladiators-style, by the tabloids. Blur’s Country House beat Oasis’s Roll With It to No 1 but its Benny Hill-esque video for the song looked cringey then and positively questionable now. There are some elements of Britpop best left in the past.
View image in fullscreen Johnny Dean, centre, with Menswear. Photograph: David Sims
See also the way the men of Britpop influenced how the women dressed. “With the bucket hats and the baggy jeans I think it was quite a male style. It was being one of the lads,” says Curtis. Wener remembers the pressure to be more glamorous. “As we went on, I would get comments from magazine editors — ‘You can’t let Lou turn up again in the T-shirt and jeans, she’s got to wear something different’,” she says. “It started to be more fashion, whereas anti-fashion was what we started with.”
To update the look for now, perhaps it’s about looking at that beginning. Britpop survivors have suggestions – and most of them are, as they were at the time, low-maintenance. “Maybe just go for the skinny tee, and then wear whatever you usually would,” says Wener. “If you want to really be really Britpop, you need to go to charity shops,” advises Dean.
Cagliesi wasn’t around for the genesis, so he sees the time as a dressing-up box of references: “I believe that the style of that era is so universal that it can adapt to any period.”
Ultimately most people will always think of Gallagher brother-approved trackie tops, bucket hats, parkas and a swagger when they think of Britpop. “I went to see Blur at Primavera last year,” says Sawyer. “And a lot of the people there looked like Oasis.”Author: Lauren Cochrane. Source
