WHEN style guru Isabella Blow dubbed Liverpool "Livercool" in high society bible Tatler four years ago, she only confirmed what most of us already knew about the city.
People in Liverpool love clothes - although the outfits you spot around the region may not fit in with the current trends in the rest of the country.
Whether they are women dressing up in kaleidoscopic designer frocks and gargantuan hats for Ladies Day racing or lads hanging around on street corners in their tracksuits, Merseysiders never fail to make a statement.
Even the notorious outdoor pyjamas wearers ensure their nightwear is freshly laundered and carefully pressed before they venture out in it.
Liverpool's eccentric sense of style - from Westwood suits to woolly hats and mittens - has been captured in a photographic project that will be the National Conservation Centre's first exhibition when it reopens after being redeveloped next week.
Photographers Mark McNulty and Victoria Spofforth spent several weeks taking pictures of people of all ages and backgrounds they found on the streets. The result is a display of more than 20 images that provide an affectionate insight into the "Liverpool look".
"Although Liverpool's gone through an amazing renaissance and is fast becoming a modern European city, it has been over the past 20-odd years quite a poor city," says Liverpool-born McNulty, 40, who has been documenting the city's popular culture for several decades.
"People here are far more glamorous than you would maybe expect from a city that was struggling at times."
There are young boys in football kits, fashion students wearing retro-style outfits and dolled-up women on a girls night out in the Cavern Quarter.
Two androgynous twenty-somethings with asymmetric haircuts and drainpipe jeans lean against a corrugated iron shutter. Two blondes with matching barnets and almost identical black power suits stand in front of a clothes shop. In another picture, two men wearing tracksuits are shown staring into the camera.
