If you were a teenage boy who saw the ska revival come in around 1979, you wore tasselled loafters and Harrington jackets, then you wore white socks.
If you were me, you carried on doing this through the years, throughout the New Romantic era while everything went jazz funk and Haircut 100 and all you owned were pairs and pairs of chewing gum white terry toweling socks. There's a great photo of me c.1982 at Guildford Castle wearing blue and black stripey drainpipes with white socks and black suede soul slippers. What a style icon.
I think it was only when I returned to boarding school for the last year of boarding sixth form someone a mean girl took a look at my feet and said witheringly, 'still wearing white socks then?', that they finally bit the dust. She was probably right. This was 1983 after. Though Michael Jackson wore them. Nuff said.
How did this ghastly fashion get to be all the rage? Whenever there's talk of reviving things from the Eighties, white slocks and grey plastic soul slippers are not on the agenda. It's something best forgotten.
When I think back, I really should have left then in 1980. I was from the provinces, we didn't have much of a clue. When did this fashion actually die out, and what sort of person wore them?
Your views please.
