I have a confession. I was a Casual. A football Casual. All through the eighties.
          I would parade myself on the terraces of Upton Park (The Chicken Run) and the football stadiums of England, in as much expensive, branded sportswear as I could. I didn’t know it then, but my friends and I were some of the earliest logo-obsessives of the late twentieth century – slaves to branding like no generation before us. Each and every one of us had a collection of labels – some torn from purchased schmutter scored by summertime savings, others ripped from garments beckoning beguilingly from the hangers in clothes shops – on the walls of our bedrooms. They mesmerised us and whispered to us of another time, another place – a space to which we could escape from the mediocrity that was our suburban birthright.
          In short, this gear put us apart from all the mugs around us. We would compete with one another to see who could wear more money than the next man. My highest point from the ground up: Diadora Borg Elite (mythically kangaroo-leathered, of course), Ellesse sports socks. Tacchini tracksuit bottoms (white, with red stripes around the calves, not the common blue and white-striped combo). A pair of Fila swimming trunks added a handy tenner to the tally, which was augmented by a particularly rare, expensive, zippered roll-neck by Tacchini. I had an unusual red Fila BJ tracksuit top with blue and white stripes on the left shoulder, and on special occasions I would drop the cockiest bit of kit of them all : yes friends, a tweed Aquascutum deerstalker. Taking it that touch too far were the north London wankers from Highbury who would every now and then install a wristband or three; or in extreme cases a Fila or Tacchini headband would hold back the bowl wedge. But with such an aberration you couldn’t even get quite right the ubiquitous casual gesture: a flick of fringe and gob of grolley.
          But as an extra-special layer, a styling example of pure golf cool betwixt tracksuit top and Tacchini roll-neck, I wore the the plume de ma tante. It was a Lyle and Scott Argyle sweater, of course (every Casual worthy of the name had a stack of them), but this particular v-neck was special. It was of a hue unseen in the lad-fashion boutiques that had begun to spring up on the high-streets of the nation. Its diamond patterned design was of a complexity unimagined by the worthy Scottish weavers responsible for the majority of these garments. Its lambs’ wool­angora mix was of a fnesse unfelt by all but the most delicate of Hampstead ladies. And the final touch was that the logo was almost imperceptibly small and tucked away in the bottom right of the design. Where did I unearth this treasure? Bond Street, perhaps? Blagged from some chaotic away day to the West End with a bunch of tached and­ tatted scouse cohorts? Did I fuck. I scored this sweater legally from the golf shop at Hainault Golf Course, run by the municipality of the London Borough ofRedbridge, on the Ilford-Romford borders. The heart no less, of metropolitan Essex.
          Because, you see, being a Casual was all about digging around, finding obscure, seldom-seen sports-casual apparel, and, once you possessed them, combining these items in ever-more arcane relationships. In the latter years of the eighties (before ecstasy and house music swept the land and changed our lives forever) an Armani jumper would be set off nicely by a pair of stonewash Lois jeans and a pair of Clarks Desert boots. A multi-coloured patchwork leather-and-suede jerkin would be worn with skin-tight purple Jumbo cords cut at the cuff and the most expensive Timberlands in Christendom. Kicker-tags racked up like campaign medals on our newest pair of red ankle-boots; icons of our status, top-boy talismans that signified that you knew the score. We were obsessed with the arcana of branding. We could spot moody merchandise at a hundred paces. Around 1985, an article appeared in the the supposedly groundbreaking style-bible The Face, where the scribe had followed a bunch of nameless London hoolies up to Leeds on a football Saturday. Photographs, of course, accompanied the text, and well – how me and my crew laughed. All the usual high street irrelevancies were there: the Benetton blue and white striped rugby shirt, the velour blue Fila BJ, moody versions of which were by now littering the boot of every Ford Capri in East London and Essex. These mugs were way behind.
          What these commodified chumps hadn’t realised, you see, was that the obscure golf shop; that dank den of leather-smells and turps, reminiscent of a garden shed in fact, was where discontinued, deleted, never-sold golf apparel would hide away from the light in pre­-entrepreneurial Britain. In a way we were transgressing the brand obsession, getting away with being working class slaves to status, by finding these totemic items that undermined our own obsession. We had taken it as far as it could go, and we had disappeared into our own image of ourselves.
          And it’s happening around us again. What was once the preserve of poncey plaid and an explosion of primary colour and polyester is now littered with style. Labels from Prada, Gucci and Burberry to the skate­-rat aesthetes of the West Coast are cashing in on golf ‘s born-again coolness. Let’s face it. You have to wear slacks, for fuck sake, so make them stylish. Digging around in old-school pro shops may not yield much these days, because you can bet that designer labels will have produced a vintage version of whatever you may find. All the fat psuedo-­gangsters at the football now drop Stone Island as their insider-sign. But it pays to know from where it is that these style obsessions have emerged.
          Let us never talk of things again.