A brand new dilemma for this dedicated follower of anti-fashion
IAM seriously worried that fashion may have caught up with me. For more than four decades, my relationship to fashion has been as the long-eared bat is to beach volley ball, as Daniel O’Donnell is to grand opera, as suet pudding is to the wafer thin Amanda Bryam. I have been so far under the fashion radar that might as well be in the same remote orbit as Pluto, as distantly removed from the mode of the moment as to be all but undetectable. An examination of my wardrobe at Medders Manor suggests a man who is more interested in camouflage than style, more influenced by climate than the vagaries of passing trends.
My last serious attempt to take a fashionable initiative was in or around 1971 when I persuaded my now much missed mother to sew a couple of inserts into the legs of a pair of trousers. The intention was to make the garment properly bell-bottomed, as per David Bowie or whoever was leading the Carnaby Street set at the time, but the adolescent me did not have the flair to carry off such an extravagant flare. The hoped for effect on the girls at the parish disco in Our Town never happened, though there was no fault to find in Mother’s efforts as a seamstress.
Thereafter I retreated into denim-clad anonymity during leisure hours and donned whatever passed for a uniform on the sports field, college lecture room or work place, never poking my head above the sartorial parapet. I must confess to spending more time during the late seventies than was healthy grooming shoulder length locks in a vain effort to look just a little bit like yer man in Sweet (or was it Slade?). And then along came punk, at the end of the decade, a movement which freed young men to have bad, short cut hair styles, deploying the word ‘style’ here in the loosest possible sense. The excesses of punk never appealed to me. I experienced no urge to reach for garish coloured hair dyes or to string paper-clips together as accessories, while I would rather baste my feet in boiling oil than indulge in body piercing.
On the other hand, I knew where to find plenty of doddery, old fashioned barbers at the time capable of providing bad, short hair-cuts, without their even realising that they were coming close to being cool. Though the standard of barber has improved, the Medders hair has remained unwaveringly short ever since, in keeping with the policy of spending as little time as possible thinking about such things. No foppish pony-tails. No messy brylcreem. No pondering about where to put the parting.
It may have been in the early nineties that the last element was added to my personal fashion repertoire of short hair and nondescript jeans with the purchase of a batch of collarless, long sleeved shirts featuring two or three buttons just below the Adam’s apple. There has been no call to wear a tie since.
Some of that batch of shirts are still in service, while more have been added occasionally as time has gone by. A few are faded red or jaded blue in hue but most are grey, either because the manufacturer intended them to be grey or because they have been rendered grey by repeated laundering. They provide ideal accompaniment, I always think, to shapeless jackets, or to shapeless jumpers, or to shapeless jeans…
Passing our local gents’ outfitters the other day, I noticed a shirt in the shop window. A long-sleeved shirt. A collar-less shirt. A shirt with three buttons at the throat. My interest was aroused.
Inside, the assistant informed me coolly that the shirt on display was priced at €35. Thirty-five euro. That’s about €30 more than I was expecting to pay for a glorified vest. That’s at least a tenner more than I paid for the special shirt worn on the special day the knot was tied with dear Hermione.
The assistant pointed proudly to a little logo on the chest. I peered closely and discerned the word ‘Petrel’ – at least, I think it was Petrel. The word meant nothing to me but, when I reported back to base, son Eldrick’s nose twitched as he smelled a Brand. He would far rather far wear Brands than mere clothes.
He explained that that the shirt in the window carried some serious Branding. So now I must worry that, if Petrel are setting the headline, can SuperFly be far behind? With the monstrous regiments of Abergavenny & Fletch to follow. It is an appalling prospect.