The Fall’s frontman had a uniform of shirts and leather jackets, which suggested he couldn’t care less about what he wore, an anti-fashion approach to fashion. Of course, this made him all the cooler
Being hailed as a style icon would probably amuse Mark E Smith, the brilliant, cantankerous frontman of the Fall who died yesterday, a man whose vanity could be neatly surmised in his decision, aged 55, to get his black bottom teeth lightened to a deep yellow to match the top row of teeth. But there was certainly a look, hewn from an anti-fashion fashion, which would become one of several constants in the band’s ever-changing image. The now infamous John Peel observation, “They are always different; they are always the same” referred to their live performance, but he could easily have been talking about one of Smith’s creased leather jackets.
Smith saw himself as a beacon of normality. For starters, there was almost always a tight, crisp shirt to perform in, the sort that the Kinks’s Dave Davies wore, but probably cheaper. It’s unlikely that, in the 1970s, Smith’s were Vivienne Westwood, although the oversized collar suggests at least some handle on the decade’s fashion. On stage, these shirts were usually unbuttoned twice, sometimes colourful, and worn under a V-neck. By the early 80s, he leaned more towards white shirts, which he started buttoning up. It was a uniform that, like the music, grew tighter and sharper. But there were flourishes of masculinity, even vanity, which reappeared again and again: the high-waisted trousers, the trimmed moppish hair and the rather excellent leather jackets (which came cropped, or long and creased in perhaps PVC). On stage, Smith wavered between a schoolboy and accidental Hedi Slimane muse. Only his face gave his age away.
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