Two years in the making, 3 nervous breakdowns, 25 personal accounts of featured events, over 200 full colour pages, 45 fashion pages, over 500 photographs, 75 designer labels, 25 scrapbook pages, 78 pairs of training shoes, 8000 shapes thrown on the dance floor and so much raving your Adidas Gazelles had holes in them.
Explosive, truthful, frank and entertaining, Dressers is the definitive social history of young working-class youth culture. From the football terraces of the early 80s to the legendary raves and dance scene in the 90s, Dressers charts the route from Italian sportswear to baggy rave gear - all placed against the backdrop of a small steel-working town 10 miles outside Glasgow.
Chronicling the rise of one of Scotland’s original football casual groups, Dressers is a gripping insight into the mad Saturday afternoon fracas that exploded into town centres and football grounds all over Scotland and the subsequent evolution through fashion and the dance scene.
Accurate, funny, fashionable and sometimes dark, these exploits continue through to the 90’s when being arrested was beginning to lose its appeal. Football casuals took a back seat as the rave and club culture exploded with the introduction of “that pill” right through to the new millennium.
With football fans having been long at the forefront of casual fashion, Dressers provides first hand recollections of the inspiration taken from figures as diverse as Bjorn Borg and Massimo Osti to Carl Cox and The Prodigy.
British style genius Jay Montessori said, “From a set of lads that could have been any of us living through that inspirational era, Dressers fuses the excellent observations of Phil Thornton’s ‘casuals’ book (from a Scottish point of view), with a fantastic pictorial and fashion section to rival our own ‘80s casuals’ bible.”
He continued “For me there have only been two books of note about this thing of ours. I would consider ‘Dressers’ to be the third.”
Up to 30 years of first-hand accounts, memories and the most in-depth account charting football, fashion and the rave scene in Scotland, Dressers is a must read for football, music and fashion obsessives alike – enjoy!
