You get a dressing down if you don’t dress up

WHILE walking home on Friday night, a drunk girl leaned out of a car window and yelled at me, ‘Nice backpack!’.

In Tesco yesterday, a very, very old lady stopped me near the freezer section and asked me where I got my top. I am astonished Vogue has not yet called me for style tips.

With spring upon us, your thoughts may have already turned to whatever whims lie within the fashion industry’s new collection of must-haves.

They haven’t? Well, you’re not off the hook because on the street and in the supermarket, you are being marked out of ten.

And maybe also in the air: at the weekend, two sub-teen girls wearing leggings were not allowed to board a plane because they were not dressed ‘appropriately’.

Admittedly, leggings are not a great look. Ten-year-old girls are about the only sub-species that can rock them, the rest of us pour into their stretchy embrace and risk looking like twin silhouettes of South America.

United Airlines was forced to defend itself – apparently the girls were travelling as part of a benefit that gives cheap air travel to employees and their families, and one of the conditions of the perk requires the passengers to be ‘properly clothed’.

Which sounds fair enough, except the girls’ dad sailed through wearing shorts, and shorts are a far worse fashion crime, redolent of Morecambe and Wise sketches, and with an unhappy tendency to cling like a baby koala bear to all the wrong places.

It’s 2017 in a liberal society and yet dress codes are still in place. Last year, David Cameron – lovely suits – paw-swiped Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions when asked what his mother would make of problems in the health service.

Cameron replied: ‘I think she would look across the despatch box and she would say, ‘‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’’.’

A voice of patrician tradition there but also drawing attention to the fact that, looking at Corbyn