The Sartorial Legacy of ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ at 40
By Lauren CochraneMy Beautiful Laundrette, the Stephen Frears directed, Harif Kareshi-scripted film, came out in 1985. The film is – rightly – remembered as a boundary-pushing queer multi-racial love story, with the breakout star of Daniel Day-Lewis. But, with it back in cinemas for the fortieth anniversary this month, it’s a time to look again, and look at the clothes they wear. Because, as well as all of the above, the film is a study in a classic era of workwear.
This is a film about work – or about the lack of it. It’s also a time capsule of what it was to be young and working class in Thatcher’s Britain, a time where youth unemployment meant only 18 percent of school leavers were able to find jobs. At one point, Day-Lewis’ character Johnny is asked by one of the racist skinhead characters why he is working at a Pakistani-owned laundrette. “I want to do some work for a change,” he replies “instead of just hanging around.” Strikingly, Day-Lewis is – in clothing, anyway – work-ready from the start of the film, when we see him being evicted from his squat. He wears classics of the genre: donkey jacket, hoodie, flat cap and Levi’s jeans. It’s a uniform he is rarely out of for the first half of the film. In fact, it’s only altered when he has to do actual work and he changes into a lumberjack shirt and painting dungarees.
Clothes like Day-Lewis’ are now the established uniform of many creatives whose physical exertion is typically limited to typing on a Macbook Air. Though this style quirk was taking root before the eighties (see Beat writers like Jack Kerouac in plaid shirts in the fifties), the eighties was a golden age, perhaps because, in an era of unemployment, work – and by extension its clothing – was fetishised. At the same time that Day-Lewis was working in the laundrette, The Face magazine was in its first pomp, with vintage Levi’s, boxing gear and more part of the inspiration for shoots, and bands like Dexy’s Midnight Runners and JoBoxers brought clothes made for manual labour into the pop charts.
If Day-Lewis is a pin-up of a now-classic workwear look, Gordon Warnecke’s Omar is also worth studying. He uses what he wears to mark his change in the film, from unemployed and without a purpose – “he’s on the dole like everyone else in England,” his father says at one point – to, potentially, the mogul behind a chain of laundrettes and dry cleaners. This metamorphosis happens in the way it only could in 1985: with Omar’s transformation into a yuppie.
The character starts out in a sweatshirt and classic Lois jeans (the kind you’d now be very happy to find on eBay), but he signals he’s a go-getter by wearing suits like those worn by his (possibly nefariously) successful uncle, Nasser. This connection only becomes clearer as the film goes on, and he begins to wear the ultimate symbol of the yuppie: the trench coat. 40 years after the film, workwear like that worn by Day-Lewis is established as the uniform of the creative class. Yuppie-adjacent cosplay like Omar’s, meanwhile, is the choice of the nextgen, the latest group of young people wearing work clothes at a time when work is not guaranteed. Suits, ties and trench coats are being embraced.
In the film, business attire is what most of the Pakistani men wear, possibly as a way to assimilate in a way Thatcher would understand: through the codes that speak of money. Asked by Johnny why he’s evicting a tenant who is also a man of colour, Nasser responds, “I’m a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani.” The suit allows him to look the part. It’s central to the costume that does that very eighties thing: it spells success.
Of course, part of My Beautiful Laundrette is also about what you do when you take your clothes off – and how in fact that might be the ultimate leveller. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the film ends with Johnny and Omar topless, smiling without their costumes, except for jeans and suit trousers. Clothes might be good to signal your public-facing self, which rung on the ladder of success you have reached – but, then as now, it’s human connection that’s really beautiful.
Lauren Cochrane is Senior Fashion Writer of The Guardian and contributes to publications including The Face, ELLE, Service95, Konfekt and Mr Porter. Based in London, she writes about everything from catwalk shows to footballers’ style and the linguistics of Love Island. She is author of The Ten: The Stories Behind the Fashion Classics, and the football and fashion newsletter, Style of Play.
You can read all of Lauren’s writing on Something Curated here. Header photo: Still from My Beautiful Laundrette.