Male fashion farces

Continuing with the theme of male attire, it would be remiss of me not to pour scorn on some of the fashions that British men have ascribed to over the years; after all, my jug of scorn is never empty and this particular feature of social absurdity is a fertile field, ever-thirsty for more watering.

I look around these days at your average stereotypical hipsters and I feel privileged not to be a millennial.  But then I remember that even when I was 14-24, I never signed up fully to any clothing or hairstyle trends, so I’d be unlikely to adorn myself with the indignity that accompanies a look that is essentially cartoon Mumford and Sons ‘twattire’.  I’d probably grow a beard, I have nothing against beards, except of course my face for most of the year, but I’d stop well short of one of those oily pubic bibs that hangs off a hipster’s chin like a clump of dung stuck to a buffalo’s arse. I might favour a short back and sides, but not that more extreme cut that, when accompanying the beard, conjures up images of late Victorian, sepia-toned photographs.  I’d avoid both the nu-folk tweed that your proper Mumford twats choose as part of the affectation as much as I’d avoid the skinny jeans that are so skinny that they look like tights.  What worked for Max Wall certainly doesn’t work for a top-heavy hipster, whose torso is either too fat or too gym-inflated muscly to sit atop a pair of splindly legs without looking like the love-child of Bluto and Olive Oyl.

When I was young enough to be tempted by the styles of the day, I only went about a quarter of the way along that fashion spectrum.  My mid-80s mullet, while being long enough to have me sent home from school to have an inch cut off it, never put me on the same barber shop wall as members of those communities whose caravans perch behind barricades of bin bags on A-road sidings outside of Hatfield.  I liked to think that I looked like Bono, I certainly have the same nose:height ratio.  It didn’t do me as many favours as it probably did for Bono though.

And then when the whole Madchester scene swept the nation as I turned 19, my jeans may have had some give in them, but could hardly be called baggy, because there has to be a line. Yes, I styled my lengthening fringe into curtains flanking a centre parting, but there was a mathematically calculable point at which the slack in both trouser material and hanging fringe made you a quantifiable dickhead.  (I had enough dickhead tendencies not to exacerbate things by trying to look exactly like Shaun Ryder).

A fashion that I steered completely away from was the early 80s wedge, that leviathan fringe of high-lighted hair that enabled boys and men to look like middle-aged housewives.  What was the hairstyle of young men for two years became the hairstyle of their mums for the next twenty.  Watching the video for Wham’s Last Christmas makes me recall a one-time best mate - a fellow devotee of Madness, with whom I’d bus it down to Stiff Records in Camden every time a new single came out - who I lost to the cult of Duran Duran.  Yes, he got a girlfriend as a result of his transformation into a beauty salon Frankenstein, but he had to listen to shit music as a result.  No girlfriend could be worth doing that to your hair and then swinging that glamorous wedge to The Reflex.

It’ll be interesting to see what fad in men’s fashion comes next.  Perhaps male grooming will run its course and the term will revert to it original 1970s BBC Disc Jockey description.  Perhaps men who aren’t nonces will reclaim moustaches back from the men who are.  Maybe the next line of sports casual wear - after the constipated era of grey tracksuit bottoms for every working class white lad - will build on the gentrification that spawned the look of the Max-Wall-legged minge-faced hipster and reignite a love for Alan Partridge Pringle jumpers and diamond patterened socks in pastel shades.  Who knows? The only self-evident truth is that those who go the whole hog, only serve to stand out as the clowns in the whole fashion circus.

And if you’re wondering what propmted this rant, then it was a visit to the barber for the same hair-cut that I’ve had for twenty years and his offer to do my eye-brows while he was at it. Obviously I declined - that’s one bit of male grooming that I have to do myself.