With the Oasis reunion comes the grand return of the anorak jacket

Last Friday, the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel – better known as Oasis – ended a sixteen-year silence, reconciling and returning to the stage at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium. The concert marked the first of seventeen dates on a reunion tour, with each show reportedly bringing in £6 million (£3 million each) for the two brothers. It’s been made clear that the fee won’t hit their respective bank accounts until the last guitar on stage has been unplugged: an incentive to keep them from blowing it all up with yet another brawl. Much like the one that led to the band’s split back in 2009, just before a gig in Paris. Word has it, the spark that lit that fire was a plum hurled across the dressing room by Liam at Noel. One wonders whether it was the insult or the fruit’s notoriously staining nature that truly caused the row.

After all, the story of Oasis has always been about more than just music – it’s also been about style. From 1994 – the year they released their debut album Definitely Maybe – to the end of the decade, their image became inseparable from Britpop and that cultural moment immortalised as Cool Britannia. It was a time of feverish excitement in the UK, a Swinging London second coming, where sonic and fashion traits that would otherwise belong to the underground merged with mainstream culture. It was a time when blokes sporting Mod bangs could end up pulling supermodels, and even someone like Tony Blair – the most neoliberal Labour Prime Minister in British history – was turned into a pop icon of sorts.

Central to the meticulously constructed visual identity of Oasis was their outerwear. An endless collection of anoraks, windbreakers and parkas, which endured well beyond the Britpop era and the eventual dissolution of the band. These garments lived on well beyond the Britpop glory days and the band’s breakup, helping to cement a stylised mythology surrounding the Gallagher brothers and their audience: a fandom that, more often than not, veers into full-blown cosplay.

“Oasis emerged at a time when working-class Northern masculinity was still being sidelined within mainstream representation. Oasis brought that identity back into view, using both performance and dress to do so. What they wore helped assert visibility, articulate class identity, and push back against marginalisation. The clothing they relied on, parkas, trainers, branded sportswear, was a deliberate uniform grounded in geography and resistance. For fans, adopting the same garments became a way of claiming proximity. Not just to the band, but to the values and worldview it represented,” says Professor Andrew Groves, Director of the University of Westminster Menswear Archive.

As Groves finds out, even Liam Galagher’s infamous strut is deeply rooted in Northern culture. “It draws on traditions of performative male display in northern towns, particularly the Monkey Walks or Parades. These were ritualised forms of street display, linked to courtship, visibility, and local status. Gallagher’s version updated that history and projected it to a global audience. His style continued an older set of Northern social practices, expressed through movement, stance, and clothing.”

With the fervour surrounding the reunion reaching near-messianic levels, the British tabloids have inevitably churned out dozens of stories spotlighting the most improbable Gallagher doppelgängers; from Fabio, Brazilian-Italian Bristol bartender turned unlikely TikTok celebrity, to a man who proudly claims he is accosted for selfies up to a hundred times per day.

An Instagram account boasting over forty-one thousand followers, @lgwears, is devoted to the forensic documentation of Liam Gallagher’s wardrobe: a degree of scrutiny more commonly associated with adolescent pop phenomena than with the resolutely adult world of guitar-driven rock. And yet, this obsessive visual catalogue encapsulates a key dynamic within the Oasis fanbase: the convergence of Mod elitism and the Casual scene’s long-standing fascination with luxury (even better if European) sportswear.  In truth, the contemporary hypebeast generation has invented very little. With the Oasis reunion in full swing, it is their fifty-something forebears who are reclaiming cultural space through reissues of outerwear and footwear designs that the Gallaghers helped turn into icons. Fashion, in this context, thus emerges as both a nostalgic echo and a tool of intergenerational style continuity.

In the wake of the Cardiff concert, what stirred the Oasis fanbase into excited speculation wasn’t the setlist, nor the unexpectedly stable truce between the Gallaghers, but rather Liam’s choice of outerwear. The Skye Ten Anorak, the result of a collaboration between New York-based label Awake NY and Italian outerwear connoisseurs Ten c, drew considerable attention. Crafted in crinkle nylon and the brand’s signature OJJ fabric, the piece stands out as a statement of considered style as much as utility.

Founded in 2010, Ten c is an all-Italian Italian venture born from the partnership between the bolognese fashion designer Alessandro Pungetti and the British Paul Harvey, a creative duo whose synergy is rooted at C.P. Company, where they were instrumental in reviving the brand’s iconic Goggle lens detailing. The name stands for ‘the emperor’s new clothing’: a manifesto that calls for luxury, functional but essential pieces. 

At the heart of Ten c lies an obsessive focus on fabric innovation, a legacy that traces back to the pioneering work of Massimo Osti, now taken to striking new heights. Among the brand’s most notable achievements is OJJ (Original Japanese Jersey), a proprietary interlock jersey made from a polyester-nylon blend, developed through Ten c’s own experimental treatments.  “We dye the fabric first, and then, to further refine the material, we also dye the finished garment,” explains co-founder Alessandro Pungetti. “This double-dyeing process makes the fabric more compact and gives it a richer, more tactile quality.”

 Andrew Groves

The results are jackets that appear deceptively simple, yet are technically intricate. Most importantly, they’re lightweight: a crucial detail when it comes to Liam Gallagher, a man famously committed to wearing anoraks no matter the forecast. Be it a breezy Mancunian night or a sweltering European festival, Liam’s on stage, hands behind his back, zipped up to the neck in his unmistakable act of subcultural peacockery.

“It’s been a wonderful surprise. Considering that we didn’t sponsor this endorsement, I realised that true style is priceless,” commented Enzo Fusco, president of Ten c. Groves, instead, wasn’t surprised by Liam Gallagher’s choice. “Ten c belongs to the same landscape of technical Italian menswear as Stone Island, but it operates at a lower volume. It focuses on material integrity and manufacturing detail rather than symbolic branding. While Stone Island has become widely recognisable and heavily connoted, Ten c remains more niche, with value placed on knowledge of the product rather than visibility. There is also a broader shift tied to age and authenticity. As Gallagher and his audience grow older, there is a clear preference for garments that retain cultural weight but feel more considered.”

Of the two Gallagher brothers, it’s Liam who seems to have arrived at this reunion in the best shape, both physically and in terms of cultural relevance. Contributing to putting his name back on the map also was Stone Island’s 2024/25 campaign, Community as a Form of Research. The campaign features members of the Stone Island community as models, each of whom was asked 100 questions.

“Classic or modern or both?”, asked question seventy-five.
“All this new stuff doesn’t do it for me. It all stems from the classics,” answers Liam. It’s a telling comment, a reminder that even the most cutting-edge anoraks in his wardrobe are, at their core, evolutions of a timeless staple: the classic US Army parka. One example? The Kangol parka Liam wore during Oasis’s 1997–98 tour, now etched in music and menswear history.

“The parka operates as a form of cultural shorthand in British menswear, particularly within working-class contexts. Its repeated adoption, from postwar military surplus to Mod uniform, from terrace wear to Britpop staple, reflects how garments can accumulate and embody meaning across time. "Liam Gallagher’s use of the parka was never simply about style. It drew from this existing lineage and recontextualised it within a 1990s cultural framework shaped by regional identity, masculinity, and resistance to the London-centric fashion establishment,” explains Professor Groves.

Liam’s love for Stone Island is hardly breaking news. In 2017, the singer lamented on X (formerly Twitter) –  where he often dispenses thoughts with the authority of a seasoned pub oracle – the theft of several Stone Island jackets from his hotel room during the Glastonbury Festival. A cruel twist of fate, perhaps, for choosing the comfort of a bed over a muddy tent, which would have rather fit the Stone Island DNA. Recently, the brand had turned the Liam Gallagher ad into a murales, painted over the facade of a fish and chip shop on Ashton New Road, right in the heart of Manchester City’s territory, and just down the road from the club’s Etihad Stadium.

 Andrew Groves

Lidl – which already made headlines with its limited edition sneakers in 2020 – didn’t miss the chance to comment on this and jump on the reunion bandwagon by launching the “Lidl by Lidl” jacket (a cheeky play on the Oasis track “Little by Little” and the jacket potato that had been circulating online). Straddling the line between a playful stunt and a savvy marketing move, the announcement arrived with an advert that closely mirrors Stone Island’s campaign, painted over that very same Manchester chippy wall.

The Lidl jacket, complete with a bottle opener zip and refrigerating pockets, uses the brand’s signature colours — blue, yellow, and red — as a nod to the 1994 Berghaus Trango anorak. The model is one of the most loved pieces from the outdoor brand, which rose to cult status after bein worn by Oasis in their mid-to-late ‘90s heydays. The jacket has been of many Oasis-related pieces reissued ahead of the awaited reunion. Needless to say, the face of the campaign was Liam Gallagher, whose net worth is reportedly around a tenth of his brother’s (£4.3 million versus £53 million), who can instead count on the songwriting (and in some cases producing) royalties for the band’s biggest hits.

According to Groves, Lidl’s move into fashion is not parody. “It exposes the mechanics that already define how fashion operates. Their garments operate as both product and critique, demonstrating that fashion value is created through perceived scarcity, exposure, and their ability to provoke engagement, rather than construction or material quality.”

Speaking of Manchester, one of Stone Island’s 100 questions posed to Gallagher was: “What’s your favourite city?” “Manchester City, and Manchester the city,” he replied. Football – and once again, chance – played a key role in turning yet another piece of clothing into a cult item. Enter the Umbro drill top, a pullover anorak in Manchester City colours which, legend has it, Liam stumbled upon in the changing rooms at Maine Road – the club’s former ground – just minutes before taking the stage at the band’s now-legendary April 1996 gig. The design is another one to be added to the list of pieces recently reissued to mark the band’s reunion. 

A similar fate was shared by Liam’s footwear of choice for the two Cardiff reunion shows: namely Clarks Originals Desert Rain in Dark Cola suede. Anche in questo caso la scelta è stata slegata da forme di sponsorizzazione ma dettata da un più profondo legame culturale e identitario tra il cantante e il marchio del Somerset, al cui cuore c’è però dell’Italia. Matteo Bellentani, Head of Product & Design, says: “Liam wore the model, originally introduced in 2004, which he’s always loved for its idiosyncratic design. We reissued it this year in the Jumbo Corduroy version, in collaboration with him, and it sold out straight away. What’s exciting about it is that none of it was planned in advance; it was a natural decision, which makes it all the more special.”

These impulsive, off-the-cuff choices have always defined Oasis’s laddish, subcultural-driven attitude and visual identity, transforming seemingly ordinary garments into pop culture staples. The brands involved, needless to say, are still sending thank-you notes.