How Noel and Liam are doing the Oasis look in their 50s
April 1996 Maine Road, Manchester City’s stadium. Oasis is playing at their beloved football team’s ground and there is a definite sense of homecoming in the air. Local boys done good. Rock stars for the ages. ‘Avin it large, in the sun-shee-ayne. (It was actually cloudy).
The tensely urban overture of helicopter blades clatters from the PA. There is mayhem and feverish anticipation in the crowd…and then the band strides on stage, doing that cocky, shoulders-back, Madchester pimp walk thing. They are dressed, not necessarily to kill, but more for a rainy hike up nearby Kinder Scout perhaps? Or a spot of train spotting at Manchester Piccadilly maybe?
Oasis played two nights at Maine Road and on both nights guitar hero Noel Gallagher seemed to be channelling, not the traditionally flamboyant stylings of, say, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page or vagabond Rolling Stone Keith Richards, but “Keith” in Mike Leigh’s 1976 classic Nuts In May. A zipped-up and impermeable “Pac Jac” jacket by US outdoors vendor Penfield for both gigs. Red and cream on the opening night, Olive green and navy blue on the second, Noel making bonafide music history as the first rock star ever to team an Epiphone Sheraton guitar and a Marshall amplifier stack with a foul weather cagoule.
In his pale blue Umbro sweatshirt and baggy pants, Liam Gallagher looked like he’d just come back from stealing your hubcaps (he nicked the top from a Man City changing room). The rest of the boys, Bonehead, Guigsy etc? Baggy, stripy shirts (very 90s, very FHM / Loaded magazine) at least two of them shod in Adidas Samba sneakers.
But here’s the thing – go to YouTube and watch the cameras at these concerts pan from stage to audience and you’ll see that the (overwhelmingly male) crowd is dressed pretty much the same as the performers. And this was, and still is – especially in light of the 2025 reunion tour dates – the whole point of Oasis. In that grey-skied, 1990s pop moment, they became, as the NME put it, “a band ‘of the people’, rather than a band ‘for the people’ ”. With the clobber to match.
Oasis’s clothes were not aloof. They were, and still very much, available. Familiar and unpretentious brands – Umbro, Adidas, Puma, Kangol, Wallabee, Fred Perry – can be purloined at shopping centres, sports retailers and branches of Blacks Outdoor. Instant and inexpensive, the Oasis wardrobe was/is a footy-terraces take on the new, clean and contemporary ideals adopted by the mods in the 1960s. Pair your buttoned-up, Burberry shirt with a Liam swagger, a feather haircut, a Kangol bucket hat, some pastel-lensed John Lennon shades and an ever-present Benson and Hedges filter tip and you had the classic Oasis “look”.
Of course, as time moved on, as the band got bigger, more famous and richer, the garms got better and swankier. I was working as a menswear editor and writer in the 1990s and vividly recall the nice, Sloaney PR girl from Gucci telling me about a visit from Patsy Kensit and her then-husband Liam. The showroom appointment was mainly for Kensit to borrow a new Tom Ford frock for a party, but Liam, in tow for the day, moody and bored, had other ideas.
Spotting a huge, honey-brown sheepskin parka sample, with a hood and Tyrolean horn fasteners, he took it off the rail, toggled up and pulled the hood over his famous haircut, announcing, repeatedly, “I’m not taking it off. I’m not taking it off”. Liam was gifted the Gucci sheepskin, albeit by default, and good to his word, wore it almost constantly for the next year.
Liam, you see, ever since he was a kid, has liked anything that alludes to the military parka silhouette with a hood to boot.
Back in 2010, I interviewed the gobby, swaggering frontman, for GQ, and the whole conversation was pretty much about clothing. He admitted being “into fashion”, “but not all the bullshit that goes with it”, and certainly not “all that fancy dress stuff”. We discussed the entry-level drugs of his teens – Sergio Tacchini, Robe di Kappa and Patrick. Then, Stone Island, CP Company, and Nigel Cabourn.
“For me, it was clothes, football, music, fashion. All at the same time. We were all into the same thing. I wanted it all and I got it all…eventually. Beg, steal or borrow, d’you know what I mean?” On an early trip to London, with a bit of proper 1990s cash in his pocket, Liam invested in a statement duffel coat by Armani. “That coat cost me about a grand. I remember going back up to Manchester wearing it and all my mates said, what have those Londoners done to you?”
At the time of our conversation, the recently post-Oasis, still pre-arthritic Liam was looking back to go forward with his ensembles, rocking an all-black Sgt. Pepper-style military coat and a Small Faces neckerchief. “I think my style is just going to get better and better with time. You watch…I’m going to turn into f- - - - - - Sly Stone, man.”
This personal obsession with cosmopolitan/psychedelic clobber and progressive shopping, he insisted, negated the need for a professional stylist. “Having people to dress you? I am not ‘avin’ that,” Liam told me, properly appalled at the idea. “That is f- - - - - - shocking mate. And I can spot them a mile off, them bands who have been ‘styled’. U2? There’s no way you bought that jacket yourself, is there Bono? Coldplay? They’re at it too.”
“I had a stylist till I was ten,” brother Noel once told Jonathan Ross. “She was called ‘Mum’, then I got rid of her – if you can’t dress yourself, what can you do?’
Unaided and deep-pocketed, the Oasis songwriter has made sartorial progress too. With his pre-divorce net worth estimated at around ￡53 million, Noel has gentrified rather than calcified, in his late fifties, preferences are less Arndale Centre and more Bond Street. The hair (a bit grey) survives, the mod-ish Harringtons and leather bombers by Lot 78 and Sandro also still there, now worn with a silk scarf, tied like “modfather” Paul Weller’s.
Older Noel’s jeans of choice are Nudie, sneakers are Golden Goose. No “Dadidas” sportswear or oversized shirtings. Everything fits him properly these days. He won’t be wearing a Penfield cagoule this time around.
And when the camera pans back to the audience at that first show on July 25th 2025, what will be the Oasis masses look? Almost two decades on, grislier and fatter, hair less abundant and ever more unwilling of the short-on-top-long at-the-side style made world-famous by Liam, will the classic, centrist dad Oasis fan have adapted to a newer, Nu-Mod wardrobe? Will Sir Keir Starmer’s, Seventh Decade Scally get-ups be the stylistic benchmark in the Wembley Stadium mosh pit?
Fashion writer and Substacker Teo Van den Broeke – born in 1987, so, just nine years old when Oasis played Maine Road and only 22 when the band split up – believes that a new generation of more fashionable fans will be joining the Bellies In Bucket Hats down the front this time around.
Nu-gen designers and influential young things on the internet are embracing the Oasis look “as their own,” he explains. Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Loewe, has included broad-footed versions of the Wannabe loafers (first made ubiquitous by 1990s shoe designer Patrick Cox) in a recent collection. Meanwhile, British shoemaker Clarks is busy with Moncler and Supreme Wallabee collaborations.
Quick as you like, Levi’s has already released an Oasis T-shirt line celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album Definitely Maybe. Internet searches for baggy, Harrington-style jackets and knitted polo shirts, says Van den Broeke, have shot up since the reunion was announced.
“The “Britpop” hashtag has over 23.6 million views on TikTok [with] influencers and vloggers interpreting the look in a variety of ways. “Teaming, for example, oxblood tassel loafers with denim, and vintage tailoring with classic Italian sportswear.”
“When the Oasis tour news broke,” Van den Broeke reports, “dancing TikToker Thomas Meacham was quick to post his own take on Britpop style – all waxed greyscale trench coats and matchy-matchy denim two pieces.”
The new, “matchy-matchy” Oasis look? Big on Tik-Tok? I am not, as Noel might say “‘avin that.”
