Stuarts London 'So, What Were The Girls Wearing?!' Book by Roo Oxley

Following the success of her best-selling debut Clobber! Bridging the Gap Between Casuals and Their Clobber, Roo Oxley returns with So, What Were The Girls Wearing?! a groundbreaking and original exploration of female football casuals and their long-overlooked place within subcultural history.

While football terrace culture and casual style have been widely documented, the presence of women has remained largely absent from the archive. Oxley challenges this omission, turning to the “forgotten tribe” of female casuals and placing their voices at the centre of the narrative.

Drawing on raw, first-hand accounts from original female 80s casuals, alongside academics, social commentators, brand owners, collectors and participants from across intersecting and overlapping subcultures, the book offers a layered and insider perspective on female identity, style and belonging. Oxley captures the clobber, the codes, and crossover into wider female football fandom, documenting a story that has long been overlooked.

At its core, the book interrogates how female casuals’ authenticity and legitimacy have been constructed and policed, and how their histories have been shaped through a long-held male gaze. It explores in detail what they wore, what they consumed, and how meaning was created through clobber; not simply as fashion, but as a form of subcultural knowledge and capital. The same frameworks that applied to male casuals are present here, but have remained unheard until now.

Arguing that women were never absent from football culture, only overlooked and written out, Oxley bridges academic research with lived experience to create a new, necessary archive.