Journalist Robert Elms’ The Way We Wore is a formative-years memoir based around clobber. It is Fever Pitch in natty threads, but if that sounds like an exercise in cynicism, don’t let it put you off. The Way We Wore is also an affecting social history of London told through street fashion.

In 1965 Reggie Elms is a sharp-suited mod living for the weekend and in thrall to nothing more than “getting it right” and parading up and down Burnt Oak high street. To Elms the younger, and to thousands of others, this is akin to heroism. So begins a lifetime’s obsession with looking good, looking right and becoming fluent in the secret language of clothes.

If this seems a tad shallow, Elms knows the relevance of his story, knows that whilst middle-class youth has mostly dressed down for social cache, generations of working class people have dressed up and looked sharp. The Way We Wore is at once a celebration of that impulse and an acknowledgement of the reasons why; that dressing right is a way of saying “I exist”. You lot may have careers, houses and opportunites but we’ve got glad rags and schmutter.

On we go as each look/tribe mutates into a new look/tribe, each with its own rules incomprehensible to outsiders yet second nature to the initiated. And each with its own rulebreakers ready to move the crowd forward from mod to skinhead to suedehead to soul boy to punk until, according to this thesis, we reach the sartorial dead-end of the late 1980s.

Each tribe and the crucial details of its clothes is lovingly chronicled and forms the backdrop to Elms’ own story of being brought up poor but happy in suburban North London of the 60s and 70s. Tales of running the gauntlet across enemy territory to get the right brogues and then smelling the new leather on the victorious bus journey home sit alongside epic journeys into the darkest East End in search of fabled suppliers of imported jeans.

For me the settings doubly resonate as we share backgrounds and locations, but given the fertile changes in street culture during this time it is no surprise the first two thirds are the most interesting and resonant. When in the 1980s he becomes central to a scene rather than an anonymous participant The Way We Wore becomes more specific, less universal and therefore less interesting. Nevermind the whirl of nightclubs and second-rate pop groups that makes up the final third passes soon enough and does not detract from what has gone before. A final piece on being fitted for a beautiful Savile Row suit years in the dreaming, is confirmation the instinct for looking good and looking right never dies and gets the book back on an even keel.

Elms is perfectly capable of being a smug, narcissistic presence on TV and radio, but here he is surprisingly self effacing and (relatively) modest. I was hardly irritated by him at all. There will be those who will find the whole subject all very superficial. I, on the other hand, liked it very much indeed.

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