FASHION / The British supermarket of style: Street style has been our biggest fashion export. Now, neatly divided into tribes, it's become a museum exhibit at the V&A. Paul Rambali mourns its fate. Sarah Callard talks to those who gave seminal pieces to the show

ON THE STREETS of Britain, you can still be whoever you want to be. No-one will bark 'lemme see some ID', as in the United States, or, if you don't have any, detain you for 72 hours without a phone call, as in France. You can masquerade as whatever you like, be as outlandish as you please, and only the tourists will stare. It's an aspect of the liberal tradition in Britain that's much admired abroad - our apparent tolerance of eccentrics - where it is seen as part of the British character along with an apparently contradictory self-repression. Two sides of the coin of British identity: blending in or making a spectacle of yourself; the difference between knowing your place, and trying to find one.

These traits can of course be identified in clothing. The demure, dapper English gentleman, the Englishwoman in twin-set and pearls, always correct and comfortable, epitomise an ideal of cosiness which others, British and foreign, pay dearly to acquire. In the last decade, however, there has emerged a new and antithetical British cultural product, known as Street Style, the premise of which is anything but cosy, for it is: I don't have a home. No doubt as old as the streets themselves, this tendency of the young, urban and ill-fitting to invent styles of clothing and life - from teddy boys to trance music - is now as much of an institution as the ones to which it has sometimes caused serious fright.

It was out of such unease that, over a decade ago, I happened to play a part in the definition of street style, as the editor of a youth magazine called The Face. Casting around for a label for our fashion pages that didn't have the commercial connotations of the word fashion, we chose style. Our brief to ourselves was to cover the doings of our contemporaries in their search for identity. Since their mode of expression was often non-verbal, style seemed to fit. We became a by-word for youth style, which is a synonym for street style. Now Style is the name of a trim option of a mid-market Peugeot saloon. And street style is 'celebrated' as an effervescent, naive but nonetheless artisically valid post-Pop self-expression. Like primitive art, once of interest only to ethnographers, street style, once the province of a few trendy sociologists who read in it the tribal markings of sub-culture, is now regarded as fit for study and praise. And as with primitive art, it's the instinctual, the violent, the joyous and the sexual that is sought out and venerated for its raw, uncultivated potency.

Another magazine must be credited with the invention of street style. British art director Terry Jones was working for the Italian jean company Fiorucci in the late Seventies, and saw the kick Italian teenagers were getting from the new punk fashions from London. Inspired by the Xerox-produced punk fanzines, he started I D. It was a genial idea, and one that reversed the polarity of fashion: the studio was the street, the models were real teenagers and the clothes were the ones they wore or created themselves. It was anti-consumerist, anti-establishment, and cute: anybody could be fashionable for 15 minutes. The tenet seems highly romantic now: reject what you were fed or meant to be, and be original, be yourself.

Prior to I D magazine, pop music was the vector for street style, and indeed street style was largely expressed through pop music. Though every bit as loud and upsetting, clothes were seen as an adjunct of the music. With the advent in the Eighties of the DJ as pop star, street style needed no more singing clothes-horses, but propagated itself through the street - that is, the nightclub. Before pop music? It seems that there were always those, like the 18th-century dandies, or the Incroyables in post-Revolutionary France, who sought to say it with style. Presumably they, too, were at odds with society, confused about their sexuality, liked to stay up late, and their revolts went the way of all the others. In our era, it was learned by the hippies and relearned by the punks that political energy is easily sapped. Any style, no matter how extreme, can be packaged and sold without the substance.

Advocates of street style contend that style is substance, that form is content; a baseball cap is genetic code, containing all you need to know about hip-hop subculture, and enabling it to reproduce itself internationally given the right conditions. This is a post-modern idea, and the notion of street style as anything other than a problem of delinquency came along with Postmodernism. Not only was style substance, one style was as important as any other. Confirming this, Karl Lagerfeld had catwalk models wearing Chanel baseball caps back-to-front before the B-boys had come to a stop from spinning on their heads.

From there, it was but a small step to the costume gallery of the V&A. The institutionalisation of street style began when Peter York, writing in Harpers & Queen in the late Seventies, became fascinated by what he perceived as emerging cultural elites, describing a frenetic battle of London's tribes - punks, mods, new romantics - in his book Style Wars. York predicted there would be no losers; all the tribes - past, present and future - would triumph in a parade down the high streets of peacock Britain. Commercially speaking, this has come true and, taking his own cue, York parlayed his job of commentator into one of high-paid style consultant. The compendious V&A collection of street styles, however, supposedly a celebration of creative diversity, arouses in me only regret. The hair-styles vary, but the facts remain the same.

'Street', as a conceptual theatre of urban guerilla warfare, is no longer a buzzword even for marketing executives. Yet it remains the cherished illusion of street stylists that they are radical, that by wearing their underwear out, or their shirt-tails out, or four buttons instead of three, they are upsetting something more than convention. Street style as fashion is avant-garde at best, and in fashion what's daring today has been done by tommorrow, anyway. Often, French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier did it. Gaultier has never denied the inspiration he draws from London street style, which flirts with taboos that French fashion, with its strict heterosexual ideals, would not dare to broach. It avoids these taboos not out of fright, but because they are not commercial. Let someone else broach them first; being anti-commercial is a luxury of designers who don't sell.

For a while in the mid-Eighties, however, it seemed that street style, which had been discovered with delight by the international fashion world, might take over that world. Lynne Franks, the PR agent who made herself the sole commercial interlocutor of street style, moved into stylish new offices, from which to run London Fashion Week, an extension of the diploma show of the fashion department of St Martin's School of art, hothouse of street style.

There was and continues to be much gushing over John Galliano. More limo, now, than street, he is a potential successor to the likes of Karl Lagerfeld. But neither he nor any of the other street-inspired designers have come anywhere near the multi-million dollar empires of French, Italian or American fashion. Street style is created by and still belongs to those who wear it; the product of particular British constrictions.

For this among other reasons, punk was the high-water of street style. A costume farce enacted in the King's Road, it nearly drowned out the hoorays for Her Majesty's Jubilee in 1977. Nor was it out of aimless spite that punk targeted the royal enemy, for the monarchy remains the lynchpin of everything stylish in this country that is not street. In this, punk was unique in the annals of British youthquakes. Rockers and mods mistook each other for the cause of their alienation. Skinheads blamed immigrants and hippies blamed their parents. They all expressed their disaffection through clothing; sometimes above all through clothing, and rightly so, for in Britain, the social is sartorial. A tidy nation, we like to know where we stand. We like to wear uniforms, even ones of separateness and individuality.

It's amusing to look back at what constituted punk style. In old photos, the Buzzcocks can be seen in Doc Martens and worn C & A jumpers. Some added rock and roll accoutrements, others the trappings of sadomasochism; some wore leather biker jackets, others plastic dustbin liners (a mink coat in the wardrobe of street style). The Buzzcocks just look like their uncles, but more distressed, or grungy, in their drab casual clothes of the Seventies, urchin eyes shiftily avoiding the camera. They are lower-middle and working-class British kids with no future, hence no place; as always the inventors of street style.

Inventing a style means inventing a life to go with it. Fighting used to be popular; dancing and sex were always primary. In the acquisitive Eighties, those bright but futureless kids thought they could access the partygoing jet-set, or at least recreate in Britain a continental cafe society, demand for which at least led to a long overdue change in the licensing laws. It's notable that, denied entry to British life, they look to what they know abroad, to black America, or holiday Europe, for cues. Business start-up accessories were street for a while, but nothing really changed.

The rebellious energy of the dispossessed is at the heart of street style. Inevitably, a great deal of it originates among the children of West Indian immigrants. Liberating and infectious, it quickly crosses over to their white friends, only just above in the pecking order; they will never access, other than through a broken window, the comfortable middle-class life, with all its certainties of place and style. They would find it hard to imagine themselevs in a tweed jacket or Aquascutum skirt. What seems a kind of colourful urban folklore, featured on postcards and now in museum collections, belies a dysfunction in British society. The forces that might produce reform are spent organising rave parties, though some may feel for Britain that's reform enough. TWO-TONE - Jerry Dammers

'I bought it in a America when we were on tour - I think it was from a thrift shop,' explains Jerry Dammers, the man who used to front The Specials, about the suit he lent the V & A. 'I was photographed in it for the first issue of The Face.' Dammers isn't so sure he was a leader of the ska revival movement. 'All sorts of different things came together at the right time - music and clothes. As musicians we were sort of copying the audience as much as they were copying us.'

The Two-Tone bands such as Madness, The Beat and The Specials were influenced by ska and Jamaican Rude Boy style. 'The Two-Tone emblem which appeared on our records was based on a picture of Peter Tosh from The Wailers,' Dammers explains. 'I first started wearing these clothes in about 1973, then when I went to art college there was a small cult of people who wore retro clothing and dressed as Teds, rockers and mods (including Malcolm McLaren and Ian Dury). This was a reaction to the white liberal hippy thing and eventually it all came out as punk. We (The Specials) got back into these clothes in about 1978, when there was already a skinhead and mod revival going on. I think we wore the clothes we did because we followed fashion the same way as everyone else. At that time it was kind of outrageous and so it drew attention to the band.'

What does the man who wrote 'Too Much Too Young' think about the V&A attempting such an exhibition? 'I think it's kind of inevitable. The original mods would never have dreamt of appearing in something like this, but I think that the kind of youth culture in the Sixties and Seventies, when it seemed to be about real rebellion, has gone. Now every kid is much more aware that they are taking part in 'youth culture'. There is not quite such a generation gap. For me, ultimately, the music was far more important. The clothes were just

superficial. But I hope that the music will have a lasting value.'

TRAVELLER - Fraggle

'I was run over by a bulldozer in that dress,' Fraggle explains. She is a member of the Dongas Tribe and is referring to a black and green dress that will appear in the Travellers section of the V & A. 'It was also the dress I wore to my first festival - the solstice at Stonehenge in 1989.'

Fraggle has been living on the road for three years and she is now actively campaigning for the environment and against the Criminal Justice Bill. 'The V&A organising an exhibition like this is a good thing because now we have been recorded as part of history. It's especially important when the government is passing a bill to say that we don't exist. I am part of a group of people who are working outside of the system. We are able to survive apart from conventional society by creating our own economy, and our clothes reflect our outlook on life. We dress brightly because we're positive and optimistic; our lives aren't boring or bland.'

Fraggle's dress code also acts as a signal to like-minded people. 'We use it to relate to each other; you can look at someone and see that you are part of the same family. Some people only see that we are scruffy. I actually think it's a waste of time to have a bath everyday. People don't realise that we are bound to be dirty because we are out in the forest chopping wood.'

Members of the tribe usually wear a variety of practical accessories around their necks. 'All of us wear spoons which we make and give to each other. We have crochet hooks to make our hats and I wear an ocarina (a clay wind instrument) which is nice to have around your neck so you can play a tune any time.'

TECHNO - Stuart Harrison

'Lots of Techno purists say that style isn't important, but I'm not that serious, which is why I wear this (a bright orange hat with two hand shapes that flop about on his head).' The outfit Stuart compiled for the Techno section of the exhibition is a mixture of military clothing and record label garments. 'If I'm walking along with an Aphex Twin T-shirt on that's got a small symbol on it somewhere, someone who's into the same thing would recognise it. But you wouldn't say anything to each other - it's a very subtle thing.' Some serious techno dudes dress in anti-fashion, they almost scorn people like Sven Vath (a DJ) because he's got mad hair - some of them are anal-retentive.'

CARIBBEAN STYLE - Dr Beryl Gilroy

Dr Gilroy came to London from the West Indies in the Fifties. The V&A is exhibiting some of her clothes for the Caribbean style section of 'Streetstyle'. This is a slightly different category in that Caribbean isn't a sub-culture, but has been included because, along with Western style and Ivy League, it has been an important influence on street fashion. When Dr Gilroy arrived in Britain, 'Everyone was wearing grey and black and we brought bright colours. We were used to wearing beautiful colours. We would walk along dressed to the nines and bouncing with confidence - people had never seen the likes of us; they'd never seen black people smart. In England people had television and they had a stereotyped idea of black people, jumping around naked, then they would see a group of beautiful girls all dressed up and they would stare]'

'Our style was unusual because lots of the girls from the West Indies would make their own clothes. Once I made an evening dress out of yards and yards of blue gingham because I couldn't afford anything else. And people were astounded because it was the first time they'd seen gingham used like that. We used the cheapest material in the way that you would use silk or satin - that's how we brought style. We also mixed fabrics so you got unusual textures. We really enjoyed our clothes.' Did she feel any tension dressed up in London?

'Well, we couldn't win, you know. If you were dressed up, people would think 'you are wearing our clothes', but if you were in bright clothes from the (our) country, it would be 'look at those foreigners]' '

SKINHEAD - John G Byrne

'I was only eleven when I first became interested in skinheads and I was about twelve when I really became part of it,' explains John G Byrne, a gay skinhead living in Brighton. He compiled an authentic Seventies outfit of Brutus trim-fit shirt, red braces, Levi jacket, Levi jeans with turn-ups and eight-hole black Doc Marten's for the 'Streetstyle' exhibition.

'Skinheads liked being tidy and clean, everything had to be just right; half-inch turn-ups, half-inch braces,' he says. It figures that the early Skinheads inherited this attention to detail from their subcultural predecessors, the mods. They also shared some of same taste in music, 'I liked the reggae music that early skinheads were into. I used to go to a club called Mr Bee's in Peckham where they played reggae and soul. The club was always full of black Jamaicans - I used to go with my friends and people were always really friendly. There wasn't trouble, like people always say.'

The photograph printed here shows Byrne as a skinhead in the Eighties - still as particular about his clothes, 'I'm a bit embarrassed of this picture because I had long white laces and they shouldn't have been hanging down . . .'

GOTH - Martin Meister

'The idea was to dress in velvet and silk - to be a dark glamorous puss; a Lord of the Night,' says Martin Meister, an Austrian living in London, who has provided the V & A with a goth outfit. 'But it's not a glam goth outfit,' he insists, referring to the plain black wool jacket, leggings, dark green shirt and pointy shoes. 'When I was 15 and 16 I became a goth in Austria. I coloured my hair black and bought all the Souxie records.'

What was being a goth about? 'A real goth had a gloomy aura but was influenced by quite sophisticated things like Edgar Allen Poe,' he says. 'Real goths were into poetry, spiritual things . . . unlike the goths today who I think are just poseurs.' Would Meister admit to being a goth now? 'Yes, because of my thinking. I still like gloomy things: my favourite film ever is Nosferatu, but as a child I liked the Adams Family and the Munsters - I thought: 'Oh God, what a lifestyle.'

RAGGA - Pascale and Oz

'Ragga's an attitude, not really a style - it's been around since the Rude Boys,' says Oz, designer and owner of the Ladbroke Grove shop Against All Oz. 'It's the sort of thing your parents would say to you - that you were acting 'raggamuffin'.' Oz's ragga outfit is an ostentatious but sophisticated two-tone velvet suit. 'I made one for myself and then everyone kept asking about it and I ended up making ten more,' he says. 'It's for the evening - I'd wear it to a blues or a dance, but I have worn it during the day when I've rolled up the trousers and tucked in the shirt and worn it trainers. In the evening I'd wear it with a pair of Italian-cut shoes.'

Pascale Riedes helped the V&A with the ragga girl outfit. 'We decided to make it in Chanel-style quilted fabric with a sort of bustier top. I'd wear it with a pair of black shorts, but a lot of girls I know would wear it with just a G-string under the netting.' There has been a lot of media coverage about the derogatory song lyrics and attitudes towards women shown by ragga DJs. Pascale claims this is inaccurate.' The lyrics don't bother me because the girls have got a lot of control - they are the ones who are wearing the hot pants (often called Batty Riders) and they know that men are quite weak when it comes to their bodies. If you're out with a group of ten girls and you know that if one of you gets hassled, everyone's with you and you're safe,' she insists. 'The women who are really dressed up are making a point and having fun.'

Oz agrees: 'When you go to those dances and you see a girl 'skinning out' she is always with a big posse,' he says. 'Their attitude is really saying: 'don't try and diss me'.'

NEW ROMANTIC - Adam Ant

Adam and the Ants were formed in 1977. We were influenced by the Sex Pistols and punk,' says Adam Ant, otherwise known as the Dandy Highwayman or Prince Charming. 'At the end of punk, things sort of bloomed. I was getting sick of everyone in black. I'd been messing around with make-up and kilts, and it all became heroic and colourful.'

The V & A has borrowed Adam Ant's highwayman outfit from the Theatre Museum. 'The first time I wore it was at the Electric Ballroom in Camden in 1979 with Apache Indian war paint.' Did he feel as though he was part of a new musical movement? 'I think that the term New Romantic was really something the media made up. It was first quoted by Richard James Burgess, I think, and he was referring to Spandau Ballet who were really the New Romantic band, not Adam and the Ants. Our influences ranged from the Sex Pistols to Roxy Music and David Bowie - we were like the glam end of punk.'

Adam had a number of different stage guises: ' There was the pirate look, the Apache look and the kind of Royal look,' he says. 'I liked lots of rich textures and colours, loads of gold and silver - I made a lot of clothes myself: 18th-century men's shirts are the sexiest shirts a man can wear. Ask Vivienne Westwood.' One of the jackets he wore regularly was hired from Berman & Nathan, the costume hire company (now Bermans). 'I had a friend there, Charles David Whiting, who was head of the military department,' he explains. 'My favourite film at this time was The Charge of the Light Brigade and Bermans had the jacket David Hemmings wore in it. I hired that jacket from them for about two years and they ended up giving it to me.'

The Bermans jacket appealed to another musician in the Eighties. 'I had a phone call from someone saying they were Michael Jackson and, of course, I thought it was joke so I put the phone down,' Adam says. 'Then it rang again and it was Quincy Jones saying Michael Jackson was trying to talk to me. Anyway, he asked me where I'd got my jacket from and I told him and then he started going to Bermans.'

HIPPY - Shirley Abicair

Shirley Abicair arrived in England from Australia via Singapore and Karachi in the Fifties. 'I was a music student. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to arrive at the airport wearing a Punjabi dress, silk baggy trousers, tunic and embroidered slippers, with dead jasmine in my hair and around my wrist - it had been a long flight. I was singing folk songs and was interested in different cultures. It just seemed a natural thing for me to do.'

In the Sixties Abacair spent her time between America and England. 'I was in New York because I was writing an album there, and then I spent some time in Oregon which I loved because of the space and air. When the Sixties arrived I was in my element. I bought beautiful Twenties and Thirties clothes from the Chelsea Antique Market, and tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans from stalls in the King's Road or Carnaby Street. I had a beautiful burgundy Borsalino hat that I bought in Greenwich Village and wore everywhere and with everything. It was, in fact, my second Borsalino - I lost the first one at a Grateful Dead concert at the Phillmore West in San Francisco.'

HIP HOP - Steve Pang

'I was fourteen and living in Bristol when I first became interested in being a B-Boy. It was the early Eighties. I was watching kids rapping but they were confused because they were wearing Casual clothes and rapping to hip hop. I was getting into the clothes because of the labels. Then I accidentally bought the soundtrack to (the cult hip-hop film) Wildstyle and that was the start of it.'

B-Boys and hip hop are most definitely part of black youth culture but Pang, whose parents are Chinese, didn't have any trouble. 'As long as you weren't white, you were accepted,' he says. 'In fact, lots of people into hip hop are also into kung fu - there is a band that's big right now called the Wu Tang Clan who have named one their tracks after a kung fu film.'

So was there a feeling of solidarity once you were wearing the right B-Boy clothes? 'In the early days it was like being part of a family. You wouldn't really get ordinary people staring at your clothes, but kids who were into the same things would stare at them - there was quite a lot of one-upmanship and competition. Everyone wanted Kangol hats no matter how stupid they looked, and Puma States (trainers).

'But I never went around calling myself a B-Boy. At the beginning it was all about dancing - now it's more about an attitude. I would call myself a Home Boy, but now I can see the commercialisation of it - the way it is being marketed and sold back to the kids who created it.'

Steve has lent two outfits to the exhibition. 'The first is from 1982. The T-shirt was designed by Zephyr the graffiti artist who worked on Wildstyle; the V&A had it sent to them from someone in New York who read in The Independent they needed it.'

PUNK - Christine Powell

'I was an art school punk. 'At first I kept my hair long and just dyed it odd colours. But eventually I shaved it off. Cropped hair was really shocking in those days. But on the whole I remember punk as being friendly, anti-racist and non-aggressive - that was why we liked it,' explains Powell. 'I think that there was a kind of naive political reaction going on but I was only 16. Punks were mainly nice individual people who felt slightly out of sync with the rest of society. All the Mohican hair stuff is a bit of a media myth.'

The V & A have acquired a lot of DIY punk clothing from Christine's wardrobe. 'My friend Lesley made the shirt for me and we both added chains and things to it. We'd make jewellery out of paper clips and safety pins and painted them red and black. The trousers were made from a skirt I had, I think they're just safety-pinned together on the inside. I don't think that was a statement, it was probably more to do with the fact that I had thin legs.

'Some punks who were not at all racist would wear nazi symbols. This was a way of saying 'let's devalue these clothes and take away the stigma attached to them'. I understand now that it was probably incredibly offensive to people and you really can't play around with imagery like that.'

What about the drugs and violence? 'We never bothered with drugs, and I didn't want to be associated with the aggressive element,' Powell says. 'At the beginning it was fun and postive; if you met another punk you'd talk about the clothes you were wearing. Soon it became almost mainstream and too far removed from what it started out as so I gave up on it.' You can still see die-hard punks around today, along with goths, bikers and headbangers, but Powell's days as a punk were quite short-lived. 'We moved out of being punks quite quickly as we got into different music. I realised as I got older that I didn't want to be labelled as just one thing, and that it was, in fact, restraining me.'

'Streetstyle', sponsored by The Independent and Perrier, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, W7 on 16 November until 19 February 1995

(Photographs omitted)