I took William, our 13 year old, shopping the other day to buy a new pair of trainers.
The old ones had lasted about 3 months until he grew out of them...
Pesky meddling adolescence!
It was an experience...
There is a brand... which I refuse to name but I bet you can probably guess which one it is... which makes very stylised trainers which cost a small fortune...
To me they look revolting.
To William they're cooooool...
And they're also cooooool to all of his friends apparently because they all wear this hideous brand too...
The power of brainwashing by advertising...
Hate it.
Cue the phrase that I seem to use more and more these days...
A phrase that, when I was little, I associated with "old people"...
What does that say about me now?
Anyway...
"It wasn't like that when I was young...!"
There... I said it.
But it wasn't.
Trainers didn't really exist in the early 70s. Or if they did I wasn't aware of them.
There weren't the big brands paying gazillions to sports people to prmote their overpriced wares...
Footballers wore black boots with little or no branding on. There was the occasional "three stripes of you know who" but that was about it.
My boots generally looked like these:
So the brands weren't pumping out advertising to us children... (get the play on words in there? I'm quite proud of that one!)
And I remember someone at our junior school turning up one day with a pair of red football boots. From memory they were own-brand (Winfield) from Woolies.
And whereas now coloured boots seem to be all the rage (William's latest are grey!) back then they were like a magnet to ridicule.
And boy did "Master Red Boots" get that.
I felt sorry for him... up to a point. It was never cooooool to wear Woolies footy boots but there was nothing really wrong with them... but by picking red ones he was asking for it.
As I got older I do remember having a pair of Stylo Matchmaker boots, a pair of Patricks'... and a pair of Gola boots too (I used to take them to bed with me... I was 18 at the time!)
I'm joking! (about the being 18 part... not about taking them to bed... I definitely did that!)
But I wasn't fixated on any brand as you can tell... none of us were back then.
So... to the main point of this post... we didn't wear trainers. Everyone but everyone at our school wore the same thing...
Plimsolls...
Black...
No laces...
Stretchy elastic bit on top...
Gum sole...
Always with a little rubber label underneath which just had to be peeled off and used as a rubber (at which it was pants!).
We used them for P.E... incidentally, do you remember "Music and Movement?" Thinking about plimsolls brought that to mind...
We used them for country dancing (which was a weekly lesson).
Ewwww...
It involved holding girls' hands (which at that age was about as unpalatable as things got... it was almost as bad as pink blancmange!)...
And worse still... one of the girls had a wart on one of her fingers...
Double Ewwww...
I wore them to play footy with a tennis ball in the playground (prevented me from getting into trouble for scraping my nice new shoes... again!)
It's amazing the stuff that comes to mind after 40+ years when you think of a trigger like plimsolls.
Our children looked completely non-plussed when I asked them if they knew what plimsolls are.
Thank goodness for image search on Google.
The picture took me right back.
But that's not to say that there weren't upgrades to the standard plimsolls available.
There was one name that immediately springs to mind...
White...
Canvas...
Iconic...
Dunlop Green Flash!
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2012/oct/07/sneaking-into-fashion-trainers-in-pictures
Coooooooooooolio!
I wonder if the fact that I can remember those so vividly means that the advertising and branding back then were actually the same as they are now... but much lower key.
Hmmmmmm
Any thoughts, comments or memories?
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