Don we now our gay apparel

I’ve always suffered from DSS. Not the sofa people, but DSS as in Delayed Sartorial Self-realisation. Meaning that there is usually a delay between buying an item of clothing and telling myself that it was a mistake. That delay has ranged between a day and about twenty years.

Like most people I didn’t develop any pained self-consciousness in regard to my apparel until adolescence kicked in; which is lucky given the array of sleeveless knitwear and patterned flares my parents foisted on me during the 70s.  The first battle I had with my Dad was over the width of the hem on my school trousers. Each turbulent August we’d go shopping for new school uniform, and I’d immediately head for where you’d find sta-prest drainpipes with 12 inch hems.  Twelve was the absolute maximum width to avoid flapping material round your ankles. At my school, there was a kid whose third nickname (his first was ‘Psycho’, his second ‘Norman’) was ‘Ding Dong Daley’ in response to his risibly unfashionable bell-bottomed trousers. When my Dad disparaged the 12 inch-hemmed sta-prest that I would hold up in hopeful inspection, he’d scornfully claim that the material was shit and that they’d never hold a crease; and then he’d hold up something smarter.  I’d immediately check the ankle dimensions of his choice and on discovery that these were 14 inches, I’d suffer silent convulsions imagining the whole school chanting ‘DING DONG!’ at me, with even Daley joining that chorus.  My dad failed to understand my utter revulsion to flapping material and one year he was understandably pissed off enough to buy me some 16 inch-hemmed bastards and force me to wear them to school.

I lasted one day, one day playing the part of a fashion pariah, and that evening my mum kindly took needle and thread to the calf-sails that had ruined my life (*blighted my day).

When I was a bit older, old enough to get a paper round, I had the financial independence to purchase my own school shoes and splashed out on some awesomely trendy burgundy slip-ons.  My dad, despite being disenfranchised from this decision, sought to undermine it by calling them ‘poofter shoes.’  My poofter shoes lasted about two weeks at school before wearing down through the rubber sole to the wood in the heel.  The fact that this happened so swiftly and at such a strange angle on the outside of each foot, meant that not only was I a poofter who wasted fifty quid on shit quality shoes, but I had a funny walk as well. (‘HOW do you bloody walk?’ Dad asked)

Like most animals, we tailor our appearance in order to attract a mate.  An all-boys-school environment in my teens equipped me with NONE of the social skills essential to instigating a non-platonic relationship with a female, so by the time I started university I was heavily reliant on (you might say ‘overcompensating with’) two much-treasured items of clothing - a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of cowboy boots.  The boots were referred to (by friends, who loved to revel in irony) as my ‘pulling boots’. My dad didn’t ever call them ‘poofter boots’ (probably because he’d realised I was in sore need of every encouragement possible in my fruitless quest for a girlfriend),  but in retrospect I’m not sure how I managed to overlook their contrary associations. This was a decade after the Village People released YMCA, after all.

In many ways I’m a creature of habit.  I’ve nearly always owned a pair of Chelsea boots (some new ones for work coincidentally even arrived today) and I have favoured a black leather jacket over anything else except a Harrington.  But sometimes you reflect on your own sad predictability, purely because society mocks such a personality trait, and you foolishly and ineptly attempt to be unpredictable on occasion. In need of a new jacket once in my 20s, I veered away from the safe option of aforementioned black leather jacket and selected a windcheater of less monochrome character.  It was racing green with crimson sleeves.  It couldn’t have been worse if it had had white chevrons on it and came with a racehorse to sit on. A fail in every respect. The wind cut through it like a knife as well.

Since those days I’ve not succumbed to anything quite as garish or pitifully embarrassing - although while supporting Arsenal I could sometimes be seen sporting the kind of tasteless clothing merchandise that has prevented football club shops ever being featured in Vogue magazine - but I’ll finish with a tale of wearing the right thing but in the wrong place.  I was once in a shop called Wilko, an emporium of good value homeware where I sadly indulge my fetish for buying cleaning products, and a woman approached me to ask where something was.  Within seconds of wondering why the fuck she’d asked me, I looked down at the t-shirt I was wearing.  I’d recently been to a gig to see Dr Feelgood’s enigmatic guitarist playing solo, and his name was emblazoned in big letters across my chest - Wilko Johnson.  Surreally, the Wilko cashier I went to that day was a man of more advanced years but similar music tastes to my own, and his reaction to my Wilko t-shirt was to tell me how much of a fan of the guitarist he was and how he’d seen Dr Feelgood in the 70s. Or something along those lines, I’m not sure, because he had a really quiet voice; and so I just nodded politely at his long and inaudible monologue and assumed that he’d worn sleeveless knitwear and flares to the gig. Possibly with poofter shoes.