The long-feuding Gallagher brothers may have buried the hatchet – with the announcement this week that Oasis are reuniting for their first tour since 2009 – but a slew of middle-aged millennial blokes on X seem more unwilling to adhere to Noel’s lyrical adage “Don’t look back in anger”. Tickets for Oasis’s slew of stadium dates don’t even go on sale till Saturday (mark your calendars!), but already, self-proclaimed superfans, like @BillyCorcoran, are getting their football shirts in a twist over the prospect of Gen-Z concert goers taking their seats, merely to sing along to Wonderwall. In fact, some are even calling for booking priority over younger fans who were too young to catch Oasis playing Knebworth Park in 1996, buy Definitely Maybe on tape, or watch as Liam mocked Britpop rivals Blur on stage at the Brits.
Despite the vast musical differences between Oasis and Taylor Swift (Noel Gallagher, who is decidedly not a Swiftie, said of her in 2017: “I don’t know anyone in my life who’s a fan”), it’s impossible not to connect the eight sellout dates Swift recently played at Wembley as part of her Eras tour with the four dates Oasis have lined up there in July and August 2025 as part of their UK and Ireland summer reunion extravaganza. But while the fan style of Swifties is strangely infantilising, calling for a rigorous dedication to glitter, cowboy hats and fistfuls of friendship bracelets that spell out song names, we can expect Oasis fans (old and new!) to lean a little more into the hedonistic and lager-soaked subcultural style of the messy Britpop era they went large in, even if today you’ll find most millennial devotees swapping cans of Carlsberg for Lucky Saint and microdosing CBD oil instead of mainlining hardcore substances.
While today’s stadium stage wardrobes are meticulously creatively conceived – see Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour looks, which featured seemingly endless custom pieces according to each country (think London brands David Koma, Alexander McQueen and Roksanda in the UK), the Gallagher brothers’ approach to live gig dressing was far more spontaneous. Famously, when Oasis played two dates at Maine Road football stadium in Manchester in 1996, to a crowd of 80,000 people, Liam wore a now-iconic blue Umbro drill shirt, which he found beforehand lying in the Manchester City changing room. Legend also has it that when the band played their historic 250,000-person gig at Knebworth the same year (four per cent of the UK population applied for tickets), Liam was forced to wear his then-girlfriend Patsy Kensit’s oversized chunky knit jumper on stage in August, because he was unaware he needed clothes for two performances. Rumour also has it that Kate Moss had a pair of trainers flown in via helicopter, because she could not walk around the stadium site in her heels.
On Puck’s Fashion People podcast, Lauren Sherman suggests that Umbro should host press trips to the upcoming Oasis gigs, but there’s a whole roster of labels that have long been aligned with the band, which came of age amidst the “Madchester” scene of the early ’90s, where the Hacienda nightclub felt like the musical epicentre of the world and Factory Records’s Tony Wilson was king. Adidas, Stone Island, CP Company, Nigel Cabourn, Fred Perry and Kangol have all been stalwarts of the Gallagher brothers’ wardrobes, which fused ’50s mod style with working class football culture, drew from John Lennon and Paul Weller, and made bucket hats, parkas, shell jackets and polo shirts the stylistic symbols of both British cool and chaos. These are brand relationships that have lasted far longer than the band: Liam has collaborated with a host of labels, including CP Company, Adidas and Nigel Cabourn, along with Clarks, Snow Peak and Barbour. With his own 2009-founded label, he has even teamed up with Umbro on multiple collaborative drops, including a sell-out take on that blue drill top. Still dedicated to Italian technical wear aficionado Stone Island, he tweeted in 2017: “To the c**t who stole my stone island parkas from my hotel room while I was playing Glastonbury hand them over all will be forgiven.”
X has imploded with memes comparing (and contrasting) the Cool Britannia era of New Labour (a champagne-clutching Noel Gallagher shook hands with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in 1997 after his party won a landslide general election victory), with the announcement of an Oasis reunion in the heyday of today’s new Labour era. While @RondellHobbs has laconically declared the main difference is “disposable income”, the coolness of the ’90s Oasis look remains undeniably relevant. And you only have to look at the Stone Island-swathed festival style of young partygoers at recent summer festivals in the UK, from Rally to We Out Here, to prove that. While there promises to be bucket hats and parkas a plenty at the reunion tour next year, it seems Oasis might not be immune to the Eras dressing effect. “Where do I join the Oasis ticket queue and are we doing friendship bracelets?” wrote @Joanna_Hardy this week on X. Noel look away now: “Oasis, this is it, this is happening!” beaded bracelets are already available to buy on Etsy.
