Seventeen Years at Wade Smith: Chris Lee on the Store That Shaped a Generation
Sportswear-obsessed Chris Lee entered the fashion industry at just 16, starting on the shop floor of Liverpool’s now legendary Wade Smith. By just 21 he had risen to Buying Director and was helping to shape what is now known as casual culture.
In the late 1970s, Liverpool FC’s recurring presence in European cup finals opened the door to a new kind of style that was largely unfamiliar in the UK. Fans returned from France, Germany and Italy with unique training shoes and premium sportswear: peices that would come to define personal identity among the terraces and across the city
As casual culture began to take hold, there were few that understood the nuances of this new style quite like Chris.
This is where his story begins.
The emergence of casual culture created a gap in the market and Wade Smith moved swiftly to take advantage of this niche opportunity. Opening on Slater Street in 1982 the store sat at the forefront of a shift already taking hold in Liverpool.
At the time, anything Adidas, Fila, Tacchini was still sold primarily through large sportswear chains, marketed for performance rather than style. Wade Smith changed that model, becoming one of the first retailers to treat sportswear as something worn for style, not sport.
Rather than relying on UK distributors’ limited range, Wade Smith – with Chris Lee – sourced directly from across Europe. Following the same routes as Liverpool FC fans, they brought back rare pieces similar to those being discovered abroad. The difference was exclusivity: Wade Smith bought and sold items that couldn’t be found anywhere else in England at the time.
This exclusivity became the main focus of Wade Smith. Casual Culture thrived on wearing exclusive items before highstreet stores got hold of them. As Chris put it, “I’d never be caught wearing a bestseller”.
So who were the people wearing the clothes? At the time, they didn’t call themselves casuals. The term was coined later by the media, as the look began to move beyond the terraces and began to dominate the high-street.
The first adopters were Liverpool FC fans, with the style quickly spreading across Merseyside and becoming distinctly Scouse in its identity. It wasn’t easy to follow, trends moved fast, and what was in one moment would be out the next.
At its core was a resistance to conformity. Wearing the same as everyone else missed the point entirely.
Variations of the look began to appear across the country from Manchester’s Perry Boys to other emerging scenes but this fast-evolving, detail-driven culture had its roots firmly in Liverpool.
Over the years, Chris Lee has built a personal archive — disintergrating trainers, faded flyers, fragments of correspondence — each piece tracing back to a moment in the culture as it was happening.
Take a look.