Britain is a nation of cliques and tribes. From the millennial fashion victims in their pizza boy caps to the doomy, dead-eyed drainers; from the Barbour jacket fascists to the nervous teenage weebs, most of these tribes can be identified by the clothes they wear alone. And the police—often called “the biggest gang in Britain”—are no exception.
It is a well-trodden stereotype and long-running joke that in Britain, you can spot plain clothes police officers a mile off. More often than not, the classic undercover copper look revolves around a Superdry jacket or T-shirt, blue jeans (usually boot cut), with a North Face fleece thrown in for good measure. In fact, of all the aforementioned items, the presence of something Superdry has become as visually synonymous with police fashion as a custodian helmet—even the police-adjacent meme account, UK Cop Humour, agrees.
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There is of course a delicious irony in this. Even when British police ditch their trademark clothing to blend in with the public, they effectively still wind up wearing an instantly recognizable de facto uniform, blatant enough for viral tweets to riff on it. Which begs the question: Why is there such an enduring connection between the country’s police force and a failing British high street clothes brand that pretends to be Japanese?
Lucas, a graffiti writer in his thirties (who chose to use a false name for this article) has had his fair share of run-ins with London’s Metropolitan Police. He describes the archetypal plain clothes worn by the coppers he’s come across as a “weird mixture of half outdoor wear and dad clothes.” He adds: “They come up and flash their badge at you and ask you something, thinking you’re going to be surprised.”
He recalls once encountering plain clothes coppers after he was caught bunking trains. “You would just see a guy coming through with a Superdry jacket and blue jeans,” he recounts. He tells me of another occasion when the British Transport Police’s graffiti squad turned up outside his parents’ house in a large Ford Galaxy. “I was just sat in there with handcuffs on, on the way to the police station, and I just remember looking around thinking, ‘What is going on?’ They all had Superdry jackets on.”
So what’s behind this unholy alliance? Interestingly, Superdry does sell a pair of blue straight-cut jeans called “Officer Jeans.” A brief search online also reveals a police discounts website that provides offers for Superdry clothing, and officers can also get cheaper deals if they have a Blue Light Card (a discount card for frontline services).
Sadly, neither the cool kids in the British police force nor the booming Y2K fashion trend has been able to rekindle the wider appeal of Superdry, a struggling brand, which—despite being valued at as much as £1.7bn in 2018—was forced to quit the London Stock Exchange in 2024, and has had to cut jobs and shutter a number of stores. One store worker, who wished to remain anonymous, informs me that the majority of customers coming in these days look like middle-aged dads. He’s only worked there for a few months, he says, but in that time he’s met one man he assumed was a police officer and another who told him he was one.
In 2010, the Metropolitan Police Authority warned of “police ghettos”—“villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire disproportionately over-populated with officers, because they like to live together.”
Our fashion choices tell stories, whether we intend them to or not. And the desire among plain clothes police to dress so similarly gestures at something deeper about the conformist nature of policing and the fact that so many officers hail from such similar backgrounds.
Nusrit Mehtab, who falls outside of this narrow demographic, is a former senior police officer who worked in the Met for over 30 years, fulfilling both undercover and plain clothes roles. She tells me that the crime squad, burglary squad, and shoplifting squad, among others, would occasionally be told to don plain clothes. On these occasions, she recalls her male colleagues reporting for duty with the same haircuts, wearing Barbour, Superdry, and North Face jackets that made them stick out like “sore thumbs” in the communities they were policing. In her view, they rarely made an effort to blend in, preferring to dress alike or wear their “best clothes” while on the job.
She thinks so many plain clothes officers fail to go under the radar because they aren’t based in the city, instead commuting in from the surrounding home counties. “If you have never lived in London, you have never integrated into a London community, so you don’t understand that community,” she says. “When you wear your plain clothes, you are going to stick out.” Back in 2010, Kit Malthouse, who chaired the now-defunct Metropolitan Police Authority, warned of the issue of “police ghettos”—referring to “villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire which are disproportionately over-populated with police officers, because they like to live together.”
Mehtab explains that police officers studying at university were often encouraged by the Met to dress smartly—something which is “pitting them out to be different” from the get-go. “They train people to be looking the same, speaking the same, acting the same, and moving in a particular way, moving as a collective,” she says. Mehtab, who has written a book called Off The Beat: My life as a brown, Muslim woman in the Met, also argues there is an issue around the Met not recruiting enough officers from ethnic minorities.
“They have this misconception of loyalty to a policing family,” she says. “There’s no such thing, by the way, and I think there is that attitude when police officers go to work that they all should be having each other’s backs; looking the same, behaving the same, thinking the same, and I think that is part of the policing problem.”
Of course, it’s hard see the phrase “policing problem” and not immediately think of the spate of scandals involving violence against women that have plagued the Met and other police forces across the UK. Or the jaw-dropping 363-page Casey Review, commissioned in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by a serving Met Police officer in March 2021. The review reached the conclusion that the Met is guilty of institutional racism, misogyny, and homophobia. The fact that so many officers insist on dressing in the same plain clothes seems indicative of a certain pervasive culture that comes with serving in the force.
But what did Superdry themselves have to say about all this? Sadly, after responding to initial emails, the brand declined to comment. But Peter Williams, the company’s former chairman, told me over the phone that he was not aware of any explicit relationship between Superdry and the police. He also said he “very much” doubted that Superdry’s founder, Julian Dunkerton, ever consciously courted this cohort of customers. Williams clearly hasn’t seen the wealth of “starter pack” memes for plain clothes police online—or if he has, he didn’t let on.
Follow Maya Oppenheim on X @MayaOppenheim
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