Skinhead (Traditional)

About

Skinhead is a working-class British youth subculture that emerged in the late 1960s as an evolution of Mod, born in the multicultural neighbourhoods of London where white working-class youth and Caribbean immigrant communities mixed at the same dancehalls and shared a love of Jamaican ska, rocksteady, and reggae. The original (sometimes called 'trad' or 'traditional') skinhead look was sharp and proudly working-class: cropped hair (a deliberate rejection of long hippie styles), Ben Sherman or Brutus button-down shirts, narrow braces, slim Levi's or Sta-Prest trousers turned up at the cuff, Crombie or Harrington jackets, and Doc Martens or Loake brogues. By the late 1970s a small but loud minority had been recruited into the white-power movement (Skrewdriver, the National Front), distorting the public image of the entire subculture. SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) was founded in New York in 1987 specifically to reclaim the original anti-racist working-class identity, and remains an active organisation today. The traditional skinhead scene endures globally as an explicitly multicultural, ska-loving, anti-fascist tradition.

Not white-supremacist 'boneheads' — Traditional Skinhead is a 1960s UK working-class fashion subculture born in multicultural London dancehalls and rooted in Jamaican ska/reggae; SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) explicitly defends this anti-racist heritage against later racist offshoots.

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