Ben Sherman Blog: ‘First to wear Gazelles’ flaming contest starts here.

The Liverpool Boys are in Town is easily the best fashion book to land on my desk since the Helmut Newton full of high-maintenance German women eating raw steak and walking their Rottweilers.

Subtitled The Birth of Terrace Culture, it follows Liverpool fans from the mid-70s to the early 80s focussing on their esoteric and design-led fashion tastes. Dave Hewitson – the man behind the 80sCasuals.co.uk - book surges with detail and colour including a potted history of the Wade Smith chain and - my favourite – an exhaustive description of the ‘Retro-scal’ country gent look that many adopted when luxury sportswear became too ubiquitous.

The real surprise is the authentic photography – nothing like this has been published before, with similar titles having to make up numbers with modern photos of old looks.

When you think how many art books and biographies are given over to, say, Hip-hop, Punk, and other cultures that the guy who does all the buying at Borders can get easily get his head around, it’s plain irritating that it’s taken so long for British casuals to get their own print eulogy.

And simply laughable that no major publishers picked up on it. Never mind the tomes on youth culture I’ve just whined about, all sorts of pedestrian books about British menswear have been published recently – in fact, a press release for one’s just popped up in my inbox, ‘Textile Designers at the Cutting Edge’. But this provides more colour and enjoyment than any number of fawning designer profiles – and is a far more illuminating analysis of what British men like to wear and why.

Order from your local bookstore or bluecoatpress.co.uk at £8.99