A look into the world of fashion introduces Dan Carrier to an unusual way of examining history

The Way We Wore: A Life In Threads by Robert Elms
Picador, £12.99

THIS is a book of firsts: an autobiography of a man who is a self-styled fashionista, it is all about trend setting.
And biographies as a rule are not wrapped around the threads the person who wrote the book was wearing – but broadcaster Robert Elms, of Albert Street, Camden Town, has written a history of his life based mainly on the clothes he wore.
It’s about the last 25 years of pop culture he watched develop and claims to have played a major role in nurturing.
For example he was a punk before it went all high street, as he puts it. He tells us he was a prime shaker behind the New Romantic movement and if it wasn’t for him, we’d never had been blessed with Spandau Ballet.
And Robert was instrumental in setting up The Face, the pre-eminent style magazine of its time.
The BBC London broadcaster, GQ columnist and self-appointed social commentator suggests clothes are as important as your DNA in deciding who you are.
This means he glosses over details of his life that are interesting. His father dies of a heart attack when he is six leaving his mother to bring up children, his brother gets sent to borstal and he becomes the first member of the Elms clan to do well academically and gets into the London School of Economics.
“It’s a cliché now to bang on about how you were the first member of your family ever to be university-educated, but I was,” he writes.
We instead get these as asides and are treated instead to a litany of clothing ranges. Even his friend’s names become labels, like the Lacoste shirts he wore to football games: Sade, Steve Strange, Boy George and Spandau Ballet are all name dropped.
And this is because he didn’t set out to write a book about himself, he says.
“I was going to write a history of youth culture and fashion,” he explains.
“And then I realised it told the story of the lives of the male members of my family – teddy boys, Mods, skinheads, Punk, New Romantics.”
And he has seen interesting times, and telling it through the threads worn is as bizarre as it is original.
The historian Eric Hobsbawn’s tome Un-common People, makes the point that there is no such thing as ordinary people – it’s a book that traces the stories of people “whose names are usually unknown to anyone except their family and neighbours, to the offices registering births, marriages and deaths.”
So Elms’s story of growing up on a west London housing estate in the 1970s could conceivably been as interesting. But by talking solely about small cliques of people who set trends before they hit the high street is alienating to the majority who don’t have £200 to spend on a pair of trousers.
There are patches of this. Writing about his home town, he says: “Burnt Oak had become a truly sorry place. At some point a massive drug problem had engulfed the place. As the 1980s unrolled, some of the generation of kids who I’d grown up with succumbed to a virulent high. Heroin became a route to oblivion for working class kids.”
But this aspect of youth culture is left: “I didn’t set out to write a book about politics,” he explains.
Instead he switches to the role continental football had on bringing labels like Kappa to England – and kick starting the youth group Casuals.
And he thinks people who sneer at the idea that clothes are important – that fashion is essential shallow – are showing a middle class snobbishness.
He adds: “Clothes are an upper class thing and a working class thing. The middle classes are the only ones who look down their noses at clothes.
“The biggest compliment my mother, aged 80 and still living in a council house, can pay is to say you look smart.”
And he thinks that nowadays street fashion is not impressive: “Every style is ‘high street’. There is nothing exclusive.”
And he blames Acid House culture, that “encouraged 25,000 people to stand in fields on drugs wearing awful clothes” for ending the crispness of youth fashion that he knew as a young man.
He said: “I don’t want inclusive – I want to go to a small club with a select clientele who look good. But that’s not the culture nowadays.”
It means his book is entertaining for aging fashionistas who read GQ and Esquire, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit of a jumble sale.