Beware the beret, they are very silly
Appropriate age dressing is a slippery, chimeric thing. One minute mini skirts are verboten to anyone over 30. Then it’s 40. Nowadays, if you’ve got the legs at 50, frankly you should flaunt them. So, for the next five minutes at least, we’ve got clarity there then.
Leggings? Bring them on, in appropriate settings.
Bare shoulders? ’Til death do us part.
I could go on, but in the 20 hours between me writing this and you reading it, the rules could all have changed. Again. Did I say rules? Vague tentative guidelines would be more accurate. Dressing correctly for one’s age – the word appropriately no longer seems… appropriate, it smacks far too much of nanny’s disapproval – is much more a question of nuance and of feeling your way as you go along. Otherwise known as making it up.
Probably the most useful bit of emotional intelligence we could all nurture these days – other than learning when a knee toucher is a genuine groper or just been squeezed into a very cramped space next to you – is what works for us at any given point in our lives.
Which brings us slap bang up against the beret. God knows I’ve tried with them over the decades, and somehow, we’ve never gelled. I’m not alone. In fact I’d say the vast majority of humans, even those born, raised and growing to maturity in France, can’t really get the hang of them.
This is important because thanks to Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s creative director, they are once more a fashion thing. Dior’s are leather and cost £690, but cheaper versions are everywhere.
And I can categorically say that on almost everyone over 25, they look ludicrous. This, for once, isn’t a depressing comment about the gradual but inevitable deterioration of the ageing human body. You don’t need muscle tone to wear a hat, even one that looks like a mushroom with a nipple. But you do require a certain attitude, and possibly, in the case of the beret, a modicum of brain-muscle tone. A beret denotes revolutionary integrity (Che), knowing sexuality (Charlotte Rampling, a rare successful beret wearer, but only in her youth) and intelligence (Picasso). All good.
Alas, in this country, the beret also denotes buffoonery, as exemplified by Citizen Smith, eponymous hero of a hugely popular Seventies sitcom that mercilessly ridiculed Wolfie Smith, the self-proclaimed urban guerrilla who dreamed of the overthrow of civilisation while living with his parents in a semi in Tooting. Everyone over the age of 40 surely remembers Wolfie and the beret he was rarely parted from.
And this is why everyone over the age of 40 cannot, in all honesty, be allowed to wear one.