Social Distinction, cultural biography and the Fred Perry project By Carla Isidoro
Fred Perry Subcultures recently launched a competition, incentivating the public to participate in a documentaries project about the brand's role in English street culture, covering urban tribes from the 1950s to today. The competition invites the public to participate by sending in original films, stories and historic photographs. The goal is to edit six short films to be ready in 2012, directed by Don Letts - son of Jamaicans emigrantes based in London who became one
of the responsible musicians for the fusion of punk-reggae in the 70s (The Clash being a major reference here). Letts was a major player in the counterculture of the 70s and continues to be a disruptive musician, director and attentive reader of urban cultural and musical expression. But what does Fred Perry have to do with the London underground music scene, and this blog? The relationship between the brand and the music scene is long lasting and close, but it was built at a distance from the brand itself. What happened, in an interesting (but not unique) episode of consumption history was that the social value of the product was inverted by the people who wore it. The story began when the Fred Perry polo shirts in particular began to be used by post-Mod boys, the Ska and Punk scenes. It was a piece of clothing that was practical and elegant but removed from the clothing used by the working class the class the Mod boys originated from. The choice of clothing was not random and made Fred Perry leap from the tennis courts to underground clubs.
an image from the project
This is one of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between Fred Perry and London’s underground culture throughout decades. What Pierre Bourdieu refered to as ‘social distinction’ was inverted in the case of Fred Perry: the french philosopher defended in his book “Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste” that certain goods confered social disinction to the user, whereas others made clear the lack of taste and distinction. Curiously, the so-
called working class youngsters, involved in the making of English street culture, inverted Bourdieu’s thesis through the phenomenon of appropriation of elite clothing. In this context, Fred Perry polo shirts were just as much worn by ‘snobs’ as by ‘rebels’, and the latest were not concerned with the original social distinction produced by the clothing. Originally conceived for tennis players and associated to elitist sports, the Fred Perry brand is decontextualized from its roots along the 60s and 70s by those who were not interested in creating a classical social distinction, but rather a new culture through new forms of music. Contrary to serving an elite and its taste, Fred Perry was being used by a middle class and underground musicians at the service of a social ideology. It was not a process of mainstreaming, whereby everybody could wear Fred Perry, but rather one of creating new codes. The white and black stripes on the polos collars transmited the ideals of ‘black and white unite’, inherent to Ska, Mod and Rocksteady. The monochromatic clothing (black and white) mirrored the motivations and aspirations of these groups - and therefore, Fred Perry became involuntarily a part of them. This perversion of the concept of distinction, whereby it is the difficulty in acquisition that determines the value of the commodity itself, was put to the test in London, where those who did not embrace elitism wore supposedly elitist clothing - just like almost all the fashion and street brands are doing until now. London was boiling with musical culture in the 70s, and this is how the brand gained strong legacy and proximity with music: built through the urban tribes themselves. The marketing came after that, and today the brand does not shy away from this history. Fred Perry Subcultures supports various projects, amongst them, the launch of three collections of polos of the band The Specials, the support to emerging bands and also to the production of this new documentary by Don Letts.
Terry Hall from The Specials, in the past and in the present
The collection of polos from The Specials is undoubteful a proof that the brand recognises its clothings’ “cultural biography”, a term coined by the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, and its relation to past musical periods. For Kopytoff the cultural biography of objects is formed by the trajectory things take, from hand to hand, between contexts and uses, accumulating specific stories and a unique biography. This socializing view of things and objects helps us understand the interest that Fred Perry has in producing clothing that is intimately related to a band that carved its space in counterculture and in the heart of modern western music. There is a huge amount of experiences, rebellious attitudes and ideals associated to these polos - a perfect example of Commodity Flow. The fact that we may today acquire them re-inscribes a fundamental period of music in contemporary life, and on the other hand places Fred Perry in the subcultures of today. This time, through its own desire to be there.
07/11/2011