very typical vesture composed of a woolen hat (, ), a jacket (they usually wore only one of its sleeves), a tight belt (used as a knife case), stripe pants, and pointy shoes. Other features of their appearance were their long moustache, their bead chaplets (, sing. ), and their idiosyncratic manneristic limp-walking (). A related social group were the Koutsavakides (, sing. ); the two terms are occasionally used interchangeably. History Initially a music associated with the lower classes, rebetiko later reached greater general acceptance as the rough edges of its overt subcultural character were softened and polished, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. Then, when the original form was almost forgotten, and its original protagonists either dead, or in some cases almost consigned to oblivion, it became, from the 1960s onwards, a revived musical form of wide popularity, especially among younger people of the time. Origins Rebetiko probably originated in the music of the larger, mainly coastal cities in today's Asia Minor with large Greek communities during the Ottoman era. In these cities the cradles of rebetiko were likely to be the ouzeri, the hashish dens () with hookahs, coffee shops and even the prison. In view of the paucity of documentation prior to the era of sound recordings it is difficult to assert further facts on the very early history of this music. There is a certain amount of recorded Greek material from the first two decades of the 20th century, recorded in Constantinople/Istanbul, in Egypt and in America, of which isolated examples have some bearing on rebetiko, such as in the very first case of the use of the word itself on a record label. But there are no recordings from this early period which give an inkling of the local music of Piraeus such as first emerged on disc in 1931 (see above). Smyrna style During the early 20th century, the main centre of rebetiko music was the multi-national port of Smyrna (modern Izmir) in Asia Minor. The musicians of Smyrna were influenced not only from the eastern sounds inside the Ottoman empire, but also from the European-style music of the many European communities of the city, most notably the Italians. Smyrneiki Estudiantina was a group of musicians playing popular music for Greeks worldwide. After the Great fire of Smyrna many of them (Panagiotis Toundas, Spyros Peristeris, Giorgos Vidalis, Anestis Delias and others) fled to