Robert Elms

The Way We Wore is a passionate and personal account of the dazzling array of street styles and trouser tribes Britain produced from the 1950s to 1990s. Robert Elms' memoir takes us from Teddy Boys to Acid house, from Notting Hill to Soho. A love letter to London Town and the overdressed, undervalued youth who made this city such a hotbed of cool. This is the story of a life's obsession. From Ben Sherman shirts to boxtop loafers, from bondage trousers to Comme de Garcons, Elms has been there, seen it, and worn it out. It's about why you'd rather not go out at all than go out in the wrong sort of brogues, and why you just had to have a Budgie Jacket to cut it in the playground in 1970. It is ultimately a hilarious, passionate social history of London street fashion from the Teddy Boys and rude boys battling it out in his homeland of Notting Hill in the 50's to its end in Acid House in the 90's. A fond memoir of working class lads in tumultuous times and lary schmutter. One day in 1965 the five-year-old Robert Elms fell in love with clothes. His brother had just returned to the family's Burnt Oak council house in a new suit he'd picked up from a tailor in Kilburn. Otis Redding was playing in the front room. This, as his mum would say, was "all the go" - whatever that meant. This, Elms realised, was what you grew up for.

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