Suddenly they descend, like spiders. Long, spindly legs in shoes with heels that must surely require some kind of license, stepping out of imposingly murdered out Uber XLs, tottering down the street to a small market outside a football stadium.
Down an alley there's two young Stoke City fans getting their pockets rinsed and maybe even their little Stoke City ribs kicked in, and here, out in the bright lights of the main street—to the sound of heaving fat men in two-bit flat caps, huge Ralph gilets and fanny-packs filled with cigarettes and loose change shouting, "TWO FOR A FIVER, ANY TWO!"—there are droves of model types in long queues. Models with big black shades over big, exaggerated faces made of blocky polygons and expensive pastes, each one lining up to buy polyester scarves emblazoned with the name of the local football team. Small, cold-necked children look on with sad faces as wily men mark up their wares by an extra twenty.
When I say "football," I mean "soccer" and while I talk in hypotheticals, I'm just telling you what, according to industry powerhouse Vogue, is simply imminent. Championing proletariat garb like it's some hot new superfood that makes you both taller and thinner, Vogue are quick to tell us—we, the sweet, thirsty, cash solvent idiots—that the old artificial fiber football scarf is the very peak of sophistication this season. Yeah, that twenty quid Arsenal scarf is now extremely the wave. Ride that fucking wave, man. You are the *Googles popular surfer* of this shit, man.
Vogue talks of this year's look being "bad-taste-meets-good-taste" when really, we know they mean "poor-folk-meets-rich-folk." It's fine (it's not fine). I get it (I really do). Co-opting working class culture to dress down your look is a Thing. In some way we've all done it—fast fashion smashing head-on into "fashion your significant other is totally gonna leave you for if you buy" like a truck through a picket line. But, like, don't bring football into this. Football is in poor enough health as it is, suffering the kind of identity crisis usually saved for Lupe Fiascoian rappers hurtling towards a difficult third album and it could really do without condescending to right now. In Britain, football is still supposed to this huge things that is, like, ours. It's for the people, even when it's being run by faceless oligarchs with skin stretched tighter than a drum who rarely step foot in a stadium and instead choose to watch it via satellite on their mistress' yacht.
While maybe conflating sport with poor taste (and I'm saying "poor" over "bad" because, well, you know) is probably quite a distinctly American phenomenon, like buttered popcorn or school shootings, deciding that "poor" equals "cool" (hello, normcore) is not. No matter where you're reading this, we all know a clutch of well to do suburbanites who spend their Monday through Wednesday at home with mommy and daddy in a countryside home with big electric gates and the rest of their time in the city smoking cigarettes in rat-infested dives, walking around in jumpers they fished out of literal trash cans. It's such a fashionable dichotomy that we've pretty much gone and accepted it as Just Another Thing That Happens, but when Vogue is reporting on it as "he hot new trend," it's probably time to call it a day. And when Vêtements are shilling $500 bad taste football scarves with Russian typography, it's not playful or tongue-in-cheek, it's actually kind of mean-spirited. Who is it supposed to be rallying against? Is the institution of football fans—usually small children, poor old men or out-of-towners who've finally saved up enough to go to a game with all the trimmings—really one that needs tearing down? That's a "NO" from me.
I'm all for high-fashion embracing the playful and the tacky, and I'm all about trying to include people who don't usually see themselves as part of "fashion" per se, but when it's at their expense? Nah. That's not satire. That's not style. That's not fashion. That's punching them down and charging the approximate price of a brand new iPhone to get back up again.
Sam Diss is a writer living in London. Follow him on Twitter here.
