Wokecore: A style guide

How to dress like it's 2017

Oliver Dugmore, formerly of Politics Joe and the latest hire of the New Statesman, finished his degree at the University of Cardiff in the year 2015.

Everything about his politics could be deduced from this from this fact and the above image without ever having to listen to a word he has said, because in Dugmore’s world, he will always be a University student in the mid to late 2010s. A young person exercised about Brexit, about the Climate Crisis. Dreaming about having a big bag of cans with Jezza Corbyn. I can practically hear Rex Orange County ft Tyler the Creator thrumming from the above image. He is, like most of his former colleagues at Politics Joe, a conformist to an age that has already passed.

Let us begin with the centre-piece of the outfit. The horizontal stripey T-shirt, an unbranded descendant of the ‘GUESS’ T craze which swept the world of ‘Unaaay’ day festivals. Pairs well (it doesn’t) with a corduroy overshirt.

Steal his look on E-Bay for a mere £13.99.

The bigger giveaway here is the cap. Oliver Dugmore, as far as I can tell, does not actually have a particularly messed up hairline. No doubt his outspoken support for inheritance taxes and invocation of ‘Meritocracy’ are protecting his follicles. The ‘cap’ itself is simply a throw back to the fashion for Ralph Lauren polo hats (usually beige) which existed around the time that Dugmore was in higher education. But you have to really zoom in on his head to see the final touch.

See the writing? ‘Charleston SC’, e.g South Carolina. Dugmore is wearing ‘retro American vintage’, reflecting a very strange and understudied fashion phenomenon of the mid-late 2010s. It was not uncommon to see twenty year olds wearing ‘Varsity jackets’ out and about, or official NFL branded merchandise jumpers (Patriots, sometimes the Eagles). I distinctly remember ‘retro’ vintage shops at the time having American sections. Carhartt’s Works in Progress (WIP), which is possibly the wokest/most Dugmore of all the fashion brands, became extremely popular around this time. WIP is the streetwear cadet branch of Carhaart, which is an American work-wear brand.

Steal his look with this Pittsburgh Steelers Superbowl champions cap from 2006, £12.56.

I cannot actually see what Oliver Dugmore is wearing on his bottom half. But I am going to make an educated guess and assume that they are some form of straight-leg trousers, almost certainly Dickies. Oliver Dugmore would have got the idea to buy a pair of Dickies trousers from listening to the song ‘Chronic Sunshine’ by Cosmo Pyke from the YouTube recommendations of the Jorja Smith Tiny Desk.

Steal what I assume his look is on Ebay for £10.78.

Now, before we get on to exploring this phenomenon in greater detail, I will say there is a small dignity to be had in sticking to the fashion trends which existed when you were twenty-one instead of attempting to keep up with the times. One could even say there’s an admirable, masculine insouciance to refusing to buy any new clothes for the better part of ten years. For comparison, I present another former employee of Politics Joe, one Ed Campbell, who has recently decided to pursue a mullet haircut with mixed results.

Note the Carhartt jacket. He cannot quite break from himself. From what he really is.

Now to broaden our study, for it is not just Joe who festoons himself with woke. Before the scrolling down, a trigger warning. I have seen some genuinely disgusting things on the internet. And I am not talking about ISIS beheading videos or Two Girls One Cup, darker, more dreadful. But even after a lifetime of desensitisation, at the frontiers of online pornography, ‘Eating with Todd’ still has the capacity to involuntarily trigger my gag reflex. Consider yourself warned.

Please ignore the sauce and his blistering red skin. Focus on the ‘heavyweight’ corduroy shirt and the baseball cap. In the words of Nigel Farage, something is happening out there!

Note (again) cap but also the t-shirt, both of which are from Todd’s official merchandise range. The logo on the shirt draws upon the visual motifs which were popular in the skateboarding grunge milieu of the 1990s (Daniel Johnston’s ‘Jeremiah the Innocent frog’, Mark Gonzales’s early Supreme artwork) which I suspect Todd came across after watching Jonah Hill’s 2018 film ‘Mid 90s’. Around the late 2010s there was also a horrible fashion for cutesy, minimalist graphic logos (usually without text).

The really extraordinary thing about Todd, apart from anything, is that presumably he is buying the corduroy crap at a later stage in life. I make this assumption based on his weight. It is too depressing to consider that the clothes that fit Todd when he was, say, twenty-two, still fit him now.

We are of an age, myself, Todd, Dugmore - this could have been my life. This could have been my future. Were it not for Peter Hitchens redpilling me at the start of the Covid-19 scamdemic. I was saved.