'Sheer showy fun': why glamorous northern style puts stuffy southerners in the shade

The picture of the two Scouse friends above strutting down the street, all dolled up in their curlers and swinging their Mulberry Willows on their arms, sums up the northern female to me.

Full of sass and confidence and never knowingly understated, you would see these girls roaming around Liverpool’s Church Street on any given Saturday, spending all day getting glammed up for a night out. While the picture of Derrin and Demi was taken in 2012 and appears in the North: Fashioning Identity exhibition opening at Somerset House next week, it took me back to my Merseyside childhood.

Northerners are peacocks. Fashion is our armour. In fact, like music and football, it’s our identity. Look at the fuss Liam Gallagher made recently when a Telegraph writer described his parka as black, tweeting ‘It’s NAVY as in dark blue’. I actually nodded in sympathy.

On my first night out in London after moving here in the mid-1990s, I remember wondering aloud why no one had made an effort. It was a Saturday night and I was drinking cocktails in a Battersea bar called No Jacket Required. And indeed it wasn’t. Everyone was in jeans, trainers and hadn’t blow-dried their hair. They looked miserable.

In Liverpool this wouldn’t have been allowed. For starters, no self-respecting bar would be named after a Phil Collins album. More importantly, you’d dress up for the occasion, having spent the best part of your wages on frock, bag and shoes. Northerners, unlike our more self-conscious southern cousins, are proud to let our clothes show how much we earn. To this day, I’ve yet to meet a northerner who prefers blending in to standing out.

On my 1970s council estate you’d be judged on the colour and cut of your Oxford bags (not a bag at all but extremely flared trousers. Acceptable shades: chocolate brown and bottle green). This moved on to a race in the ’80s to show off your Pods and Kickers while the make of your trainees (that’s Scouse for trainers) were a matter of life and death. Ideally they would be rare imports or a cool Adidas Grand Slam and be bought alongside your Kagoule or Ellesse ski jacket at the then-iconic store Wade Smith. I flirted with this look before my older, cooler sister (whose best mate went out with one of Wah! and knew Pete Wylie) ordered me to ‘stop dressing like a Scally’.

Short for scallywag, Scally fashion became much lampooned (think of Harry Enfield’s Scousers takedown of Brookside’s Terry and Barry) and in fact you can still buy a fancy dress Scouser set on Carole and Michael Middleton’s Party Pieces website for £7.99. But laugh all you want, Harry. What began on the streets of Liverpool and Manchester in the ’80s is still very much alive and kicking across the UK today. While the shell suit is deservedly dead and buried, it has been replaced by trackie bottoms and hoodies, as modelled by the kids trailing behind the model Karen Elson in Elaine Constantine’s 2005 picture. While a photograph of Manchester lads in their Reebok trainers captured by Jason Evans in 1997 could easily have been shot today, exactly 20 years on.

By the time the northern WAG scene made its dramatic and colourful entrance in the noughties, I’d been living in London for many years, the perm and the Kickers just distant memories. While southerner Victoria Beckham became the poster girl for designer bag, boobs and tan, I always felt Coleen Rooney, Alex Curran and Abbey Clancy rocked the look more comfortably.

They shopped at Cricket, the phenomenally successful Liverpool boutique, whose owner Justine Mills ran waiting lists for her Chloé Paddingtons and stocked Juicy velour tracksuits in every colour of the rainbow. (I had one in apple green and turquoise. You can take the girl out of Liverpool…) Justine’s major headache was ensuring no two WAGs bought the same designer dress. The shaaaaame!

For me, the sheer showy fun of northern fashion is summed up in an anecdote one of my Scouse friends told me about a colleague a couple of years ago. Rather than spend her holidays in Tenerife, she chose to take off most Fridays, simply so she could start her outfit-planning early for the weekend. They wouldn’t do that in Battersea.

Marianne Jones edits The Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine. 'North: Fashioning Identity' is at Somerset House from Wednesday until 4 February 2018 (somersethouse.org.uk)

The dos and don'ts of northern fashion

DO Save the black for London. Northern women like to show their colours – sometimes the full spectrum of the rainbow.

DON’T Forget the bronzer. Pale and interesting won’t get you any drinks at the bar. 

DO Leave your flats at home – heels have never gone out of style up north.

DO Wear full make-up. We’re talking lash extensions,  lip liner, contouring, strobing, cut-creasing… The maximum is just about enough.

DON’T Plan to be fashionably late. The parties start early, and the getting-ready starts even earlier. 

DO Remember your brows. Strong, bold, filled-in and Instagram-ready, they’re an absolute must.

DON’T Follow Coco Chanel’s dictum to remove one accessory before you leave the house.

DO Put another one on.