I asked the two direct immigrants in my family – my granddad (from Guyana) and my dad (from Egypt) – to tell me what they could recall about their experience with British fashion when entering the country as an outsider.
My granddad arrived in Hartlepool in the 1950s on a merchant navy ship that had set sail from Guyana, shown the young Pedro the metropolis of New York and the arbitrary aggression of the open ocean. It was due to carry on around the globe, but my granddad hired a moped and decided he liked the sights he saw around the north of England.
There were the ladies, in their stilettos, nipped-in waists and flouncy skirts. He had Ray-Bans, Hawaiian shirts and could freestyle on the bongo drums. This made him an instant celebrity in the foggy streets of the North-East. There were just enough Caribbean immigrants in the area for him to have allies and understanding, but not too much competition when it came to novelty.
Flip-flops were the items he remembers as having the biggest shock factor. Now one of the most-worn items of footwear in the warmer months, in the 1950s British people were as likely to be seen in them as they were to move to Germany. My grandma, from the North-east of England with Welsh heritage, could never fully get over his apparent disregard for the looks people gave him if they went to the pub and he had his toes out. He says he did it for the looks, his toes were freezing and anyway, he preferred winkle-pickers, a British fad he discovered after a few nights out in Newcastle.
My dad arrived in Britain in the 1980s, having already married my mum in Cairo. He was subjected to months of interrogation and mockery of his marriage to a British woman before he was granted temporary citizenship. He wanted to fit in. But not with the fuddy-duddy pen pushers who made up the majority in the south London suburb where he lived, oh no. He wanted to fit in with the fashion crowd, with the young ones living it up in one of the coolest cities in the world. He might have been married, but he was in his early twenties and his love of the disco life was made of strong stuff (it still is).
It’s likely he funded the entire leather jacket industry at the time and he was certainly a fan of the plain white T-shirt. He stocked up on Levi’s and loafers; he left the socks in the drawer. One thing he couldn’t get on board with though, was the clean-cut coiffed hair look. He had the moustache and slight beard of Cairo movie stars and he removed them for nobody, not even the Home Office.
A country wears where it is at. Most people can visit a place and, after seeing a few dozen passers-by, make a judgement based on the fashions being worn about a number of cultural, social and political aspects of that place, whether they’re conscious of doing this or not. They may be wrong – that’s the tricky thing with judgements after all, they’re no science. For example, standing at Old Street Underground station entrance on a Thursday at 8.30am and the first groups of people that pass by have smart suits on, but they wear backpacks and more casual shoes than brogues and stilettos. They have scarves on. I can make a judgement based on those simple observations that this area is business-orientated but slightly more casual and youthful in approach than Westminster or Mayfair and it’s cold outside. These judgements may be partly right, but stand in the same spot at 9pm and the people I observe are wearing party clothes, many of them outside of the mainstream, metallic trousers and neon glasses, multiple piercings and bubble coats. This could lead me to think the area is one full of bars, clubs and somewhere more alternative than, say, the West End. Again, this would be partly true, though not the whole story. Most of us like to imagine our individuality is reflected in our style and reveals nothing about the system we are inextricably linked to, but of course it does.
So is what the UK’s wearing today related in any way to immigration?
Yes.
Even in the most mundane high street stores you’ll see colours, fabrics and styles that have been taken from every part of the globe. The ones that are popular here are often ones that originate from the very places that have a large diaspora in the UK.
Indian embroidery, East African beaded jewellery, Caribbean colour palettes, North African styles such as the kaftan, West African prints – the list continues. In no way does this mean the people from these diasporas are the ones buying (or making) these things, but it does indicate how these groups have heavily influenced what is perceived as ‘British style’ today. A quick Google image search shows plenty of the above included in the visual definition of ‘British style’, alongside a multitude of well-tailored jackets, tartan patterns and twinsets.
Of course, nothing can be called ‘British’ without including the huge array of cultural influences that make Britain what it is, but sometimes that is not what it feels like. The rhetoric around the term ‘British’ insidiously attempts to equate it with a pre-multicultural England (whenever that was, seeing as North Africans were guarding Hadrian’s Wall nearly 2,000 years ago, but whatever) that owes its celebrated arts, style and ‘values’ to nothing and nobody except the ancient British families and their rambling estates that get rolled out for every period drama.
Despite this grievance with the whitewashing of British history, I readily admit it’s not only elsewhere that has inspired British fashion. It also works the other way around. Many immigrants came to the UK, were inspired by the fashions they found here and integrated these into their existing wardrobe – resulting in London in particular being world-renowned for some of the most exciting and eccentric clothing combinations.
However, by not widely acknowledging the influence immigrant groups and individuals have had on UK fashion, we allow the story of colonial superiority in all realms to perpetuate.
I see fashion as the cultural crystal ball, an immediacy reflecting what will later be seen in other art forms, once the artists have had time to filter the nuance and the nausea into a cohesive piece of work.
Fashion-makers (and in this I include designers, printmakers, sewers, pattern-cutters, and others I don’t have the expertise to credit) are driven by a practical need, as well as a creative and financial one; to create things that people can wear. They don’t always have time to filter or to muse on the profundity of a moment – they take the moment and sew it onto fabric and we see it walking down the street and don’t think twice about it, unless to admire or object to it.
After saying all of this – what, specifically, is the majority of Britain wearing in 2016?
I couldn’t find any research that had been done into individual items of clothing purchased in Britain, outside of broad categories such as ‘shoes’ or ‘leather goods’. There was no literature on how immigration, outside of very specific groups, had influenced British fashion and it is easy to see why. The impact of immigration to the UK on contemporary UK clothing is impossible to accurately document. Therefore what follows are simply some of my musings, triggered by my fruitless searching for studies on the subject.
Amazon, despite its dubious morality regarding workers’ rights, thankfully came up trumps with a current list of the top 20 bestselling clothing items on the UK site. Not all UK residents use Amazon, or even the internet. I have no illusion that this is the definitive source of purchasing information for the country. However, I do think it reflects at least a part of our national fashion footprint and so I have chosen to expand on some of the items shown there, evaluating how their emergence into a top 20 list could possibly be linked with immigration to the UK.
Number nine on the list is a ‘Ladies Chiffon Wrap Scarf’. It has flowers printed on it and comes in a multitude of colours.
Chiffon as a fabric was invented in early-twentieth-century India. It can be made from silk, cotton or polyester fibres, but nowadays is most widely available as polyester. This particular wrap scarf is reminiscent of traditional Indian scarves that have been worn for thousands of years, with a European-influenced flower design printed on them.
Indians have been present in the UK for hundreds of years – as have people from many areas of the world – albeit in small numbers to begin with. Global trade has been happe
ning since people were able to travel and this resulted in traders and workers living temporarily or permanently in countries outside of their birthplace. India was under various forms of British colonial rule from 1612, so this migration of traders and workers would have been even greater. There is evidence of Indian seamen being buried in London during the 1600s and one probable theory is that the East India Company employed Indian seamen for their voyages back to Britain and their home.44 The first large migration to the UK by Indian women, who brought with them versions of the fantastic chiffon scarves that today sell so prolifically in the mainstream, seems to have been from Kenya in 1968, when 100,000 Indians arrived in Britain following Kenyan independence from Britain – mostly as families invited here and promised passports and citizenship. The scarves worn by these women were already reflected in the popular Western fashions of the time – the loose-flowing hippy garments and Indian-influenced designs. Much fashion of that era disappeared along with the feelings of peace and love, but the chiffon scarf evidently remains a strong staple. This is likely to be due to its versatility, durability, resistance to wrinkling and its ability to be stored in very small spaces. All of these traits became even more important by the advent of mass access to international travel. The ‘twice migrants’ of Indian origin knew this well, having travelled the globe with their belongings more times than most. Who knows if they would have had any idea that the scarves that covered them, warmed them and cooled them would become one of the most worn fashion items in Britain less than 50 years later.
Worryingly, number two in the most popular clothing bought on Amazon.co.uk is the ‘FeelinGirl Latex 9 Steel Boned Waist Training Corset Cincher for Women’. Considering the Rational Dress Movement (1881) was a significant player in feminist activism and eventual suffrage for women, campaigning as they did to free women from clothing that ‘impeded physical movement or deformed the figure’,45 it is depressing to see this elaborately named item of clothing maintain such a prominent position on the sales list, at a time when many women and men say there’s no need for feminism and/or feel a discomfort at describing themselves as a feminist. This discomfort must pale in comparison to the aches imposed by wearing the chart-topping ‘Steel Boned Waist Cincher’. French migration to Britain brought along the early obsessions with corset-wearing, although its current popularity may be more directly linked to TOWIE or Kim K. It’s generally accepted that the garment first became popular in Italy and was introduced to France by Catherine de Médici in the sixteenth century.46 It was also during the 1500s that the largest numbers of French migrated to Britain to put down permanent roots, as the Protestant Huguenots fled religious persecution in their homeland. It is from this point onward that corsets become common in Britain and throughout Europe, something which doesn’t change (although the style of the corset does) until the 1920s, as women had been asked to stop buying corsets in order to save steel for the war from 1917.47 They continued to exist as items of fashion worn in Britain for stage costumes and in sex shops as ‘erotic wear’. Perhaps their mainstream popularity resumed in the 1990s with the onset of pseudo-female empowerment branding, such as the mass commercialisation of ‘raunchy lingerie’ by companies like Ann Summers.
Prior to writing this, I would have imagined that the French presence in Britain had resulted in far more stylish items of popular fashion than the ‘cincher’, but there you go.
Now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for – the number one selling item of clothing on the UK site of Amazon … The white T-Shirt. It’s been there for 1,887 days. What is it about white T-shirts? I own two, but I just wear them under furry vintage jumpers to stop the scratchiness sending me barmy. I borrow my partner’s sometimes for bed. They have long been worn by all sexes, yet there still seems to be something quietly masculine about them. Perhaps this is attributable to their origins. Worn as all-in-one undergarments in early nineteenth-century America, these ‘union suits’ were hailed as emancipatory fashion for women, allowing them to wear more comfortable and ‘masculine’ clothing in an effort to rid themselves of the restrictions placed on them by society and manifested for all to see in the fashions of the time. These then became two-piece undergarments worn by both sexes and in the late nineteenth century buttonless versions were issued as standard US Navy undershirts. Around the same time, these easy to slip on garments became popular globally amongst miners and stevedores (a waterfront manual labourer involved in loading and unloading ships). They were convenient for hot environments and comfortable to work in underneath layers in cold environments. This global popularity may have been initiated by the US Navy presence from the 1820s in all African countries where the British Navy was stationed.48 I am purely speculating, but it is possible that the dockworkers in these countries used the white T-shirt more than the British Navy did, as all of the British Armed Forces have their own strict uniform codes. Considering that in the early twentieth century, Britain began urgently recruiting people from its vast colonies to work on British ships and dockyards49 and large numbers of Somali, Sudanese and Yemeni dockworkers took up the offer of employment, perhaps they were the ones who brought the white T-shirt to British docks long before Hollywood did – influencing fashion (and Amazon sales) in a way they would surely be unable to predict, or benefit from. Whatever the truth about its introduction to Britain is, this enduring popularity of the plain white tee is surely down to more than just practicality? I would make some guesses that it speaks to individualism’s irony and capitalism’s sustenance by allowing the wearer (and the ‘viewer’) to project any of their multiple identities onto the blank face of the top. It allows the wearer to appear theoretically classless and unclassifiable.
As my dad showed with his very own collection of bright white T-shirts, this rare opportunity for equality is often more valuable to an immigrant than others could ever imagine.
42 Siep Stuurman, ‘François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 50 (Autumn 2000), 1–21.
43 See Kristin Knox Culture to Catwalk, (London, Bloomsbury, 2011), for numerous contemporary examples of fashion appropriation.
44 Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain – 400 Years of History, (London, Pluto Press, 2002).
45 The Rational Dress Society Gazette, (1889).
46 Elizabeth Ewing, Dress and Undress: A History of Women’s Underwear, (London, Batsford,1978).
47 ‘Mary Phelps Jacob’, Phelps Family History in America. http://phelpsfamilyhistory.com/bios/mary_phelps_jacob.asp
48 Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, (Hove, Psychology Press,1968).
49 David Killingray, Africans in Britain, (Hove, Psychology Press, 1994).
Airports and Auditions
Riz Ahmed
To begin with, auditions taught me to get through airports. In the end, it was the other way around.
I’m an actor. Since I was a teenager I’ve had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.
As children in the 80s, when my brother and I were stopped near our home by a skinhead and a knife was put to his throat, we were black. A decade later the knife to my throat was held by another ‘paki’, a label we wore with swagger in the Brit-Asian subculture and gang culture of the 90s. The next time I found myself as helplessly cornered, it was in a windowless room at Luton airport. My arm was in a painful wrist-lock and my collars pinned to the wall by British intelligence officers. It was ‘post 9/11’, and I was now labelled a Muslim.
As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder, it’s taken off you and swapped out for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor. You are intermittently handed this Necklace o
f labels to hang around your neck, neither of your choosing nor making, both constricting and decorative.
Part of the reason I became an actor was the promise that I might be able to help stretch these Necklaces, and that the teenage version of myself might breathe a little easier as a result. If the films I re-enacted as a kid could humanise mutants and aliens, maybe there was hope for us.
But portrayals of ethnic minorities worked in stages, I realised, so I’d have to strap in for a long ride.
Stage One is the two-dimensional stereotype – the minicab driver/terrorist/cornershop owner. It tightens the Necklace.
Stage Two is the subversive portrayal, taking place on ‘ethnic’ terrain but aiming to challenge stereotypes. It loosens the Necklace.
And Stage Three is the Promised Land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race. In the Promised Land, I’m not a terror suspect, nor a victim of forced marriage. In the Promised Land, my name might even be Dave. In the Promised Land, there is no Necklace.
I started acting professionally during the post 9/11 boom for Stage One stereotypes, but I avoided them at the behest of my 18-year-old self. Luckily there was also a tiny speck of Stage Two stuff taking shape, subverting those stereotypes, and I managed to get in on the act.
My first film was in this mode, Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo. It told the story of a group of friends from Birmingham who were illegally detained and tortured there. When it won a prestigious award at the Berlin Film Festival, we were euphoric. For those who saw it, the inmates went from orange jumpsuits to human beings.
The Good Immigrant Page 15