A Casual Obsession: Inside the British Sock Fetish Council.

Andrew Groves

Keywords: socks, hybrid masculinities, casuals, football hooliganism, fetish.

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Abstract

This article interrogates the positioning of socks as a culturally transgressive garment by football casuals through a case study of the British Sock Fetish Council (BSFC). While most studies contextualise casuals within a discourse of hooliganism and violence, their use of dress as a means of negotiating shared masculine identities remains under-researched. Founded in 2011, the BSFC quickly grew to over 1000 card-carrying members, holding meets in Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, as well as at football matches throughout the United Kingdom. Within the BSFC, the term fetish is not used to denote a sexual predilection by an almost entirely heterosexual community. Instead, it acknowledges the members' obsession with clothing and highlights the subtextual tensions inherent in their individual and collective practices. The author was an active participant within the BSFC, witnessing first-hand the community's development through the online dissemination of highly constructed, self-generated imagery featuring colourful, patterned socks juxtaposed with rare trainers. This paper explores the self-reflexive use of social media to construct group practices and provides insights into how socks were instrumental in establishing consensus on inclusive and hybrid masculine identities within this community.

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Introduction

Casuals as a distinct subculture emerged in the late 1970s, primarily on the football terraces of the North of England and later spread across the United Kingdom. In contrast to other subcultures that use dress to reaffirm group identity, the allegiance of most casuals to specific football ‘firms’ has meant that their use of dress has been consistently used as a means of one-upmanship against other casuals who are members of rival firms. Football away days functioned as a pre-digital network, allowing participants to exhibit and observe the latest regional stylistic developments from opponents located on opposite ends of the country. This is one of the reasons that the use of dress by casuals has remained unossified over the last four decades.  This is demonstrated by the variety and complexity of the ways in which individuals engaged with the British Sock Fetish Council through their dress and its mediation through self-generated imagery, graphics, and artefacts. This article examines how men's socks have continued to be positioned as a site of liminal transgression and a focal point for male dress deviancy. It will discuss the formation of the British Sock Fetish Council and how their self-reflexive use of social media to construct group practices revealed how socks were central to the group's meditation of acceptable masculinities through the use of dress. It will demonstrate how this was accomplished through the member's cultural production of a series of socks that repurposed the iconography of male labour and protest in order to establish a point of sartorial conflict. As a result, the group’s gender practices evolved into a strategy for hybridising hegemonic masculinity in order to continue benefiting from it.

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In research and media reports, the terms 'hooligans' and 'casuals' have frequently been used interchangeably, with little recognition that, while there is undeniable overlap in terms of who each term refers to, it is critical to differentiate the two. Football hooligans have been framed as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity (Radmann, 2014). This is primarily established through their actions, which include rowdy, unruly, and occasionally violent behaviour. In comparison, casuals are more concerned with embodying their masculinity through a variety of dress activities. Additionally, many participants dispute the term Casuals (Redhead, 2015); instead, members of this subculture prefer the term dresser, and regional variations have included Perry Boys, trendies, scallies, and, most recently, 'This thing of ours.' Indeed, the names used by various football 'firms' exemplify this taxonomic state of flux. Redhead (2015) compiled a list of 400 distinct firms based on hooligan memoirs, with some clubs having multiple firms over the course of several decades. Through written accounts by journalists, researchers, or first-hand reports from former members of football firms, this subculture has been inextricably linked to violence (Redhead, 2004). This intersection with football hooliganism has resulted in a substantial body of research over the previous two decades, exploring these men within a sociological and criminological framework, (for example, Dunning, Murphy and Williams, 1988; Pearson, 2012; Rookwood and Pearson, 2012) and most notably by Steve Redhead (2004, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2015), whose research draws on over 180 football hooligan memoirs. These books primarily detail the criminal activity of each football firm; however, they frequently include detailed descriptions of the participants' attire. As such, they situate the importance of dress within this activity.

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There has been some research of casuals within anthologies of subcultural style (Polhemus, 1994; De La Haye and Dingwall, 1996) or in the context of criminality (Turney, 2020) and two notable examples published by casuals themselves, 80s Casuals (Hewitson and Montessori, 2010) and Dressers (Smith, 2012). However, there has been little academic research into British casuals and their use of fashion. The notable exception is Mairi MacKenzie (2019), for her analysis of David Bowie’s duffle on the cover of Low (1977) and its influence on the development of the first casuals in 1970s Liverpool.

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Historically fashion research has focused on designer womenswear created for, or owned by, the elite, or ‘the avant-garde, the extraordinary, and the unusual…the truly “ordinary” remains elusive’ (Buckley and Clark, 2012: 18). The ‘otherness’ (Barthes, 1957) of the casual subculture with its association with criminality, hypermasculinity, and violence have undoubtedly discouraged some dress historians from researching them. For Hebdige, football hooligans are ‘consigned to a place beyond analysis’ (1991: 97). There is a classist belief that the working-class's adoption of high-end menswear brands is both unsophisticated and worn merely to conceal criminal behaviour. But as Bourdieu noted in his seminal work on taste ‘…the working-class “aesthetic” is a dominated “aesthetic” which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics’ (1979: 41). Hall and Jefferson acknowledge this bricolage approach to dress, stating that: ‘Meanings alternative to those preferred by the dominant culture, generated within the experience and consciousness of a suppressed social group, may be brought to the surface, and so transform the original discourse’ (1990: 178).  Indeed, casuals' bricolage approach to dress and masculine identity construction has continued for over four decades, exerting a substantial influence on British menswear during this period. It is self-reflexive, subversive, and multifaceted in its cultural references.

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Ethnography and locating the researcher

Ethnography presents several difficulties as a method of qualitative research, including objectivity, data integrity, legitimacy, and ethics. However, it also has several advantages in terms of gaining access to previously inaccessible or hidden social or cultural environments. Significant ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted on football hooliganism (for example, Armstrong, 1998; Treadwell, 2008; Ayres and Treadwell, 2012; Pearson, 2012, 2014, 2014; Ellis, 2017). Pearson reflected on the inherent difficulties of ethnography, in which the ethnographer assumes the values and prejudices of those being observed and uncritically reproduces these “biases” in their account’ (2015: xi). While Treadwell asserts that its strength stems from its ability to see ‘…the world change and issues emerge before the quantitative researchers and policy makers notice…’ (2018: 291)

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Before commencing my paper, therefore, I must establish my place within the research. I am a white gay man in my early fifties who comes from a working-class family and works as a university professor, where I have taught fashion design for two decades. I am a long-time season ticket holder at Manchester City Football Club, my style is rooted in casual culture, and my dress activity is influenced by similar men who self-identify as casuals. I discovered the BSFC on Twitter in 2012 and became an active member, posting messages, photographs and attending three of the group’s physical meets. Throughout this period, people I knew both in person and those I only knew through social media became involved in the BSFC's activities. I am perceived as an insider primarily because of my attire and the cultural capital that my knowledge of menswear provides, but I am also perceived as an outsider because of my job title, which is met with both amusement and bemusement. While my sexual orientation identifies me as an outsider, it is not viewed negatively, demonstrating the inclusive and hybrid masculine identities that exist within this community.

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The establishment of the BSFC coincided with the meteoric rise in popularity of Twitter as a social media platform. It was the primary mode of communication and dissemination for the group and its members' cultural production. The ability to use social media platforms such as Twitter and, later, Instagram as data sources aided in overcoming the reliance on personal memory as a data source, both during the initial research period and afterwards to reflect on my findings.

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The sock as liminal transgression site

While there is some research on socks from a historical perspective (Farrell, 1992; Cole, 2010) or a technical point of view (Abdessalem et al., 2008; Mohammad et al., 2012), little has been written about their subversive qualities within subcultural style. However, one could argue that socks, located at the liminal zone between the internal and external, have historically been a site of sartorial transgression in menswear.

Throughout the twentieth century in the United Kingdom, unwritten rules regarding men's socks dictated that they should be plain or subtly patterned for formal daywear and colourful and patterned for casual wear and sport. However, various groups of men have deviated from this to make a statement. In Socks & Stockings (1992), Farrell describes the rise of the distinctive dressing of a group called ‘Knuts’ prior to the First World War. They were middle-class dandies dressed in brightly coloured socks, which were accentuated by their short trousers and preference for shoes over boots. In the 1949 British Mass-Observation survey on sexual attitudes, respondents noted a correlation between brightly coloured socks and deviancy and homosexuality. As Cole notes, ‘amongst its study group “Pale Blue was a queer’s ‘trade colour’ and favoured pale blue for short socks”’ (2010: 175). Following the Second World War, the association with deviance persisted when the Teddy Boys, working-class youths who had adopted the New Edwardian style - ‘a revivalist fad among ex-guardsmen and aristocratic loafers’ (Breward, 2016: 135) - began wearing ankle socks in vibrant colours or garish patterns in the early 1950s (Cohn, 1971).

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By 1968, a significant number of the British subculture known as hard mods had evolved into what became known as skinheads (Marshall, 1994). With their skin-tight jeans intentionally cropped to reveal their tall boots, the skinheads established a style of dress that became synonymous with violence to the public and the media. While fighting at football matches in the United Kingdom can be traced back to before the First World War (Dunning et al., 1984), by the late 1960s, it had become increasingly visible and its perpetrators more conspicuous by their dress. Skinheads quickly became the focus of a moral panic, which Richard Allen exploited in a series of pulp paperbacks: Skinhead, Suedehead, Boot Boys, and Terrace Terrors (1970, 1971, 1972, 1975), which provide insight into the rapidly changing fashions on the terraces in the early 1970s. The transformation of protagonist Joe Hawkins is described on the back cover of Suedehead:

 

A young and brutal bovver boy called Joe Hawkins caused outrage when he was first introduced to the world in the smash hit, Skinhead. Now Joe has grown his hair and swapped his boots and braces for a velvet-collared Abercrombie coat. His aggro days are over ... but his city-slicker days are just beginning. (Allen 1971: 112)

 

The recurring theme in Suedehead is self-reinvention through dress. In the first chapter, Hawkins rejects his working-class skinhead uniform as being too visible. Instead, he adopts the attire of a middle-class stockbroker via the precise tailoring of an Abercrombie, a heavy wool tailored overcoat that became known as a ‘Crombie.’ This, however, is merely a cover for the continued violence he commits:

 

He pulled his electric-green socks on...His socks were as important as the Crombie overcoat. Even in summer, he felt it necessary to sport the coat. There were suedeheads who did not take kindly to bowlers and umbrellas, he knew. But none of the fraternity would ever be caught dead in ‘ordinary’ socks. Regardless of all those statements to the contrary, each Suedehead had a large part of the skinhead left in his symbolic attitude towards recognition. (Allen, 1971: 93)

 

Hawkins’ overgarments serve as a masquerade of hegemonic masculinity and respectability, yet they are betrayed by his undergarments, his electric-green socks signalling his true deviant nature. This description is echoed in an interview with Nobby, a Preston North End fan, in Northern Monkeys, who recalls his transition from skinhead to suedehead:

 

A Crombie overcoat (almost always a snide[1]) was worn in winter months with a tie pin and silk hankie in the top pocket – red to match your red socks, and then various colours from bright yellow to orange to fluorescent green followed. (Routledge, 2019: 57)

 

This shift away from the hypermasculine uniform of the booted skinhead toward a more refined, inconspicuous appearance was driven in part by some football grounds banning men wearing boots (Routledge, 2019: 56). This pivotal moment of transition is recalled by an impressionable young fan, who later became a casual:

 

My first experience of football gangs was in a game at Brighton against a London team, no one was allowed into the ground wearing Dr Martens boots, outside the North Stand was a mass of feet less black and brown boots. (Brown and Harvey, 2006: 87)

 

The adoption of normative dress codes as the ultimate transgressive form of clothing foreshadowed a watershed moment in the development of the casual aesthetic. In 1973, David Bowie killed off his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, who had become a cultural phenomenon disrupting and subverting gender norms through his appearance in the previous year. Three years later, in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and then on the cover of Low (1977), his look had been radically stripped back, with Bowie dressed in a seemingly ordinary duffle coat. MacKenzie argues that Bowie’s adoption of the duffle coat was pivotal in developing the casuals’ style (2019). Kevin Sampson, who wore a wedge haircut, a duffle coat, and a pair of Pod shoes on the Kop (the home end at Liverpool Football Club's ground) in 1977, recalled in an interview with MacKenzie: ‘You’d go to places like Derby and Middlesbrough and they’d die laughing, calling you queers for the way you dressed’ (2019: 33).

Every day dress, in this case, the duffle coat, had been queered by its associations with Bowie, and a new emerging subculture was harnessing the power of this subversion. These men also understood the carnivalesque role that their approach to dress could play in undermining hierarchical structures through bricolage.

 

The carnivalesque nature of football has been extensively documented (Giulianotti, 1991; Pearson, 2012) for its ability to ‘transcend all hierarchic differences, of all ranks and status’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 246). In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin argues ‘One of the indispensable elements of the folk festival was travesty, that is, the renewal of clothes and of the social image. Another essential element was a reversal of the hierarchic levels: the jester was proclaimed king…’ (1984: 81). The casuals' travesty in appropriating and distorting the leisure class's iconic brands (for example, Burberry, Lacoste, Sergio Tacchini) exemplifies their carnivalesque mode of transgression. In Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (Turney, 2020) focuses on casuals and the fashioning of the ‘Handy dandy’; she argues: ‘Here, power is obtained through subversion; both social and cultural norms are upturned, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and vice versa, and innocuous clothing becomes invested with fear and violence; it becomes a sign of the ‘hard man’ (Turney, 2020: 81). 

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If the duffle coat was one of the first garments to be appropriated by the casuals, then socks were also soon to also become subverted as part of their attire and a means of identifying a fellow dresser. Numerous accounts (Thornton, 2003; Hough, 2007; Routledge, 2019) recall the popularity of white towelling socks with men in the late 1970s and how they served as an easy way to distinguish the general population from a clued-up casual. Recalling one of the British band the Stone Roses’ earliest performances in a club called Clouds in the town of Preston in England’s North East that descended into mob violence, Routledge describes how they ‘…looked upon the local club-goers of Clouds as backward, white sock wearers’ (2019: 307). Whereas the casuals were far more adventurous in their experimentation with footwear, as this Manchester City football fan recalls: ‘I remember well the time we wore yellow leg warmers with burgundy keks which we very bravely wore against Cardiff that elicited a raucous reaction from the deerstalker wearing masses in front of us!’ (Routledge, 2019: 231). While socks appear harmless, they could also be weaponised, as an account from a Queens Park Rangers football casual reveals: ‘Some of the lads put pool balls in socks ready to charge out... (Cas, 2021: 18), echoing the actions of Ray Winston’s character Carlin in the film Scum (1979), who also made a makeshift cosh from a sock filled with two snooker balls to attack another borstal inmate.

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In the preceding narratives, socks have been positioned as a provocative garment, partially concealed but serving as a transitional locus, allowing a glimpse into the internal and thus a means of assessing, judging, dismissing, or attacking other men.

The dress codes of British menswear are rooted in their evolution from military uniforms. When men wear their uniforms correctly, they communicate shared ideas about their status, rank, team, or class. However, civilians frequently subvert these meanings by undermining or violating established dress norms through the use of accessories such as socks, ties, and hats. Thus, members of the British Sock Fetish Council are part of a continuum of men that have employed socks as a means of signalling subversive and disruptive behaviour.

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Formation of the British Sock Fetish Council

 

The British Sock Fetish Council (BSFC) was founded on 19 November 2011 by 35-year-old Newcastle United fan Reuven Fletcher. Interviewed in 2015 by the online news site ChronicleLive, Fletcher discusses the BSFC’s origins:

‘I met friends I had made on Twitter but before meeting them I went to a well known clothes shop in Manchester called Oi Polloi and bought a pair of socks.

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‘When I met up with them one of the lads asked what I had been buying. I showed him my brown Burlington socks, he said he also liked socks and showed me his Falke Fair Isle ones.’

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When Reuven got home, new pal Matt Wright from Greater Manchester, tweeted him. And their tweets mentioned their sock fetish.

He said: ‘Before we knew it, other people were joining in. I got membership cards printed and 100 people joined. A few of us started to meet at football matches around the country and it just grew.’ (Robson, 2015: n.pag.)

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There is no documentation as to how the group's name was chosen. Given the association with football, it seems reasonable to assume that an acronym ending in FC was used so that the uninitiated might think that the BSFC referred to a football club. However, the full name of the British Sock Fetish Club is also a misnomer. Its members do not have a sexual fetishism for socks. Instead, their use of the term fetish demonstrates the subversion of expected gender norms to create a hybrid approach to masculinities. As Bridges and Pascoe state: ‘“Hybrid masculinities” refer to the selective incorporation of elements of identity typically associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and – at times – femininities into privileged men’s gender performances and identities’ (Bridges and Pascoe, 2014: 246). By 2014, the BSFC had grown to 1,000 members, with most active participants being white, working-class, heterosexual, and between the ages of 30 and 50. Most of these men self-identified as casuals, and their occupations included printers, electricians, social workers, warehouse workers, academics, NHS managers, oil rig workers, and postmen. While research on older men and their relationship to fashion is increasing (Sadkowska et al., 2015; 2017; Twigg, 2020; Almila and Zeilig, 2021), the BSFC participants represent an under-researched group within dress studies due to the intersectionality of their age, class, and sexual orientation.

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While individual football firms had previously established private message boards online, the early 2000s introduction of more general forums such as 80s Casuals and Terrace Retro enabled casuals from various football firms to communicate and share images of their clothing. Ste Connor, a journalist, recalled, ‘The internet was becoming an increasingly influential mode of communication, with like-minded souls coming together to discuss their obsessions on an array of messageboards covering topics such as football, music, clothes and training shoes’ (cited in Thornton, 2003: 263). Twitter was launched in 2006, and by 2011 had grown in popularity among casuals in the United Kingdom as a way to share information about what they were wearing, new clothing purchases, and the latest football news. Twitter's use of hashtags and algorithms to present users with content that is similar to their own quickly helped to establish a large community of casuals on the site with shared interests.

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Analysis of Twitter shows that the first use of the hashtag #BSFC in relation to socks was on 25 December 2011, and the first use of the hashtag with an accompanying image was on 30 December 2011. A self-portrait shows an unidentified man's legs cropped above the knees on top of a floral duvet (Figure 1). His legs are naked except for a long pair of knee-length socks in a striking graphic pattern in shades of black, grey, and red. The image is captioned:

My knee high socks. Setting trends, not following them.

Thirty minutes later, after this original tweet was sent, it is retweeted by another user with the additional text:

< prospective #bsfc member?