What does the well-dressed demonstrator wear these days? Well, if they're Japanese and they're out on the streets of Tokyo's Shibuya district - think Times Square-meets-Carnaby Street - it's Supreme Snapback baseball caps and skinny jeans.

That's the preferred uniform of 23-year-old Aki Okuda, founder of Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDS). The group has been leading a series of street demonstrations and it was them who brought Shibuya to a standstill recently.

But as well as protesting, an important part of the strategy is to lay on hip DJs, rappers and musicians. With many demonstrators emulating Okuda and turning up in designer gear, and some even carrying crates of vinyl, the movement has been dubbed “apparel activism”.

The tag implies that this is a new thing. It isn't. Dip back through the generations and you'll find there's always been a sartorial dimension to activism.

Swap Supreme Snapback baseball caps and Japanese hip-hop for duffle coats and guitar-playing beatniks, swap Tokyo's Shibuya district for the Great West Road running through Maidenhead, and you could be talking about the Aldermaston CND marches of the early 1960s. In fact, looking at the pictures I'm amazed the Aldermaston marches haven't been pinned to a mood board and wheeled out as an inspiration by some designer. For an Autumn-Nuclear Winter collection, naturally. I dare say someone probably took a crate of vinyl along with them then too, though in those days it would have been 78s rather than 12 inch white labels.

Fast forward a decade and you find the hippies marching in cheesecloth and high-waisted flares, which is a feat in its own right, and if you think the politically-inspired musicians of the 1980s Red Wedge movement gave no thought to fashion, you've obviously never seen the photo of them meeting then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock at the House of Commons in November 1985. Paul Weller, in particular, looks quite the peacock.

Even Swampy wasn't an entirely fashion-free zone. For younger readers who don't recall the man born Daniel Hooper, he was an environmental campaigner who underwent 15 minutes of fame in the mid-1990s when he hid in a tunnel to stop a road being built somewhere.

One of his hands was generally shackled to a tree, but with two fingers on the other Swampy signalled his undisguised contempt for all things “establishment”. Not so fashion, however, because Swampy had a pretty acute sense of style. Signature looks included grubby army surplus (these days we'd call it “distressed”), strange hooded tops that seemed to have been knitted from the stuff that bungs up bathroom sinks, and a garment that looks from the pictures like a wet suit. He had a genius for accessorising too: he was wearing head torches way before Orbital.

Swampy never met Neil Kinnock but he did meet David Cameron's mum (she was the magistrate who sentenced him when the boys in blue finally laid hands on him). He also appeared on Have I Got News For You in a waistcoat made from an old sack. For one week only, Paul Merton wasn't the best dressed man in the studio.

Apparel activism? It's as old as the (rolling) stones.