Perils of the Fad

This post gives me the pleasure of re-introducing my artist friend, Julian Peters, whose website is now full of his magical skills. Honestly, who knew that poetry and comic books could make such stylish bedfellows. I hasten you there, where you may happily lose an hour or two.

We’re all subject to fads; even the best of us. Although the more elegant of our number will point to a certain permanence of style, we nevertheless watch as cuts go in and out, longer and shorter, and as tie widths narrow and widen from one year to the next. Take time-lapse photography of the face of an adult male over ten years and you will see his sideburns dance up and down, with seasonal facial hair sprouting and disappearing whimsically. The mutton chop, however, is now dead (and wherever you see it, you can be sure it’s a fad). At least we can say that the mode du jour in these terms is only variations on a theme. Taking a broad view, things appear basically to stay the same.

Reproduced with permission. Julianpeterscomics.com

Click to enlarge.

Not so in the inelegant world. There’s a meaningless revolution every five minutes out there on the street, as vanity dolls everywhere do their best to be miniature poodle of the year. It really is as tasteless as Crufts. Someone should hand out rosettes for best in show. Particularly annoying this year is the craze among women to wear not-quite-thick-enough black tights sans skirt. This year I’ve seen more underwear, cellulite, bum sweat, and unmentionable bulges than any given single man with broadband. And all I’ve been doing is making my way on the pavement, trying in vain to mind my own business. Really, ‘ladies’, when did you decide that this was above board? If it’s merely a fad to presage the second-coming of the long dress and empire waist I might just about live with it. I fear however, that the next step will be even more revealing, and a further notch on the self-degrading scale.

The male fad that’s made me sigh most this year – and maybe it’s just a Berlin thing – is wearing glasses without lenses. That’s right, just frames. It helps if the frames are luminous pink, or green, but I’ve also seen rather swish tortoise-shell affairs astride the hipster nose. I don’t get it. Is being somewhat optically deficient in? Were my sight to diminish I should embrace the wearing of glasses wholeheartedly. Until it does, and I pray it won’t, I shall continue with nez au naturel.

Reproduced with permission. Julianpeterscomics.com

Click to enlarge

At times like this I wish I were an oak tree. As the years pass, I would barely notice these fools, and the world might seem like a consistent procession of the stylish.

Bling! Or, Put It Away, Sir

Now then. As it ‘appens.

The image of sad-old-man friendliness when I was a child was Jimmy Savile. Anyone outside of Britain will not know who this is/was. He is/was a kindly fellow – once upon a time he was a Radio Luxembourg DJ, and the first ever presenter of Top of the Pops, if he needed any cred – who had a show in which he ‘fixed it’ for children to have their hearts’ desires. I wouldn’t usually think of the ‘80s as an age of innocence. But then there was Jimmy. Sir James, as he later became, was very fond of his mum – lived with her always so far as I know – and when she died he kept her room just as she had left it. It was a shrine, and Jimmy will go to his grave a mummy’s boy, in the nicest possible way. He is a good lad, now pushing 85 I should think; always a fit man – ran dozens of marathons – but a perennial cigar smoker; and a huge benefactor of noble causes and charities. The English tend to think of him as a national institution; a classic English eccentric. He wears a lot of jewellery, for which he is famous. He looks like this:

He used to look like this:

Sportswear and jewellery remain his most recognisable motifs, save for a few choice phrases. He kind of reminds me of this:

Which is to say, that unless you’re a kind-hearted English eccentric, beloved by old and young alike, and honoured by the Queen, you look like a bit of an idiot in jewellery and sportswear. But you know that. The point I’m leading to is rather more positive. What jewellery can you wear if you happen not to be said national institution, or an idiot? Why this, for example:

Gold and mother-of-pearl cufflinks. Edwardian I think. Picked up by my wife at what I call a ‘rifle shop’ (so named because you have to rifle through a lot of junk to find the good stuff, which is always there if you’re patient). My brother has the matching pair, which I gave to him on the occasion of him being my Best Man.

Keep it clean, simple and honest and you cannot go wrong.

How’s about that then?

Dear Diary

“Dear Diary,

I have a dilemma. The funny little blog that I’ve been writing for a few months has, much to my eternal surprise, been growing in popularity. Of course, I never meant to journalise per se, and I certainly didn’t want it to be one of those crass and conceited spaces where bored individuals talk endlessly about themselves to no apparent end. Look at me! This was not the kind of attention I desired. No, I meant to create an outlet for some serious thoughts that might nevertheless be cut loose from academic apparatuses: the stifling structures and strictures of my ‘day job’. But then, you know about all that. Of course, one must entertain; such an endeavour is nothing without an audience. Hopefully, they’ll stick with me when we have to go over the hard yards. Anyway, those times are still some way off. To the matter at hand.

I don’t want to dwell on me. This blog is not a diary, after all. I’ve got you for that. But then strange things keep happening to me, and I do wonder what to do. The good people out there in the ether will probably be interested in my stories, but I can’t be seen to preach disapprobation of self-interest and wanton egotism on the one hand – it’s so terribly unmanly – and wax on and on about yours truly on the other. So, I shall commit my story to these pages, and hope in that magical way that you will provide me with the guidance I seek.

I’ve talked on the blog about compliments before, but nothing like this. Today I left my regular seat in the library and went for lunch. On my return I found a hand-written note, tucked under my book. It was from a fellow British historian, unknown to me (and me to him). He’s from a rather nice college in the northern Midwest. Harvard is something of collecting ground, it seems. He can’t have known that we had a research specialism in common. Anyway, the note read:

I love the outfit today. Great hat. Great jacket. And have picked up on you as one of Cambridge’s best-dressed men before today. Would you consider being photographed for an article on this subject?

The note raised a smile, and perhaps a blush. Just for the record, I was wearing the linen blue boating blazer with the confident white stripe, a mid-blue Valentino tie with white collar, and those new 514s I bought the other week. The trusty panama was on the desk. It’s an outfit not unlike the picture of me I have on the blog – you know the one? – only I went with the four-in-hand knot today, and an altogether more summery colour palate.

Now, how does one react to such a note. Of course, I wrote to the email address he left and asked for further details, offering thanks and suchlike. But this is such an unusual turn of events in the ordinary course of a humble man’s life, and I very much doubt that the etiquette guides would have anything to say on the matter. I’d like to ask my public for their opinion, but I loathe attracting attention to me, me, me. So, there it is. I leave it with you, dear Diary, and trust that the answer will somehow emerge.

Thunderstorms forecast for this afternoon. Till tomorrow, then.”

Only the Wrong Clothes

There’s no such thing as bad weather; there’s only the wrong clothes. So said Billy Connolly, of all people, although he probably didn’t say it first. Today in Boston it was minus 24C if you factored in the wind, which by most standards is pretty nippy (minus 45C was my personal worst, in Quebec City a couple of years ago). But still there are clothes for this kind of teeth-chattering inclemency, and if you’re bundled up, or better still, inside, it need not be unendurable. Most people today were suitably attired; but I see no reason to praise the general public for having common sense. It is, after all, supposed to be common. Allow me instead to dwell upon a little madness.

Today I observed numerous poor miserable slips of girls wearing open-toe shoes, some with heels, some flats. They sported short skirts, and fall jackets. These victims of vanity, had they brought mirrors with them on their ill-advised sojourns, would have had chance to reflect on their teary-eyed, snot-covered blue visages, with pained eyes, cracked lips and general air of quivering rigidity. Just what they were aiming for, I suppose. I also witnessed four different men, independently insane, wearing shorts and t-shirts. Shorts are difficult at the best of times, and I welcome the cold, for it saves the sartorial dilemma. What were they thinking? One, I surmise, regarded the distance between his college residence and the gym – a few hundred metres – as insufficiently far to warrant outdoor clothes. I saw him jogging stiff-kneed on the way in. I doubt very much that he survived the sweat-bathed return trip, which probably marks a good result for the gene pool. I also saw a man with a bald head wearing a coat with a hood: coat unzipped, hood down. Another man, gracefully aged, left his otherwise practical shearling coat unbuttoned. Sporting no gloves and no bonnet, his jaw assumed the set of grim death. Is this machismo? Vanity? Or is just plain stupidity?

Winter doesn’t bite here too much, but when it does its teeth are sharpened. Surely people know this? Where are the boots, the top-coats, the hats? Where are the scarves and gloves? The poor tramp I saw on the way to work this morning bravely wore everything. He knew about winter. How unjust, how insulting, to see the young and the wealthy stumble about wearing nothing but their lunacy. The ladies, frankly, looked dishevelled and sickly, like victims of gin, or a Hogarthian rake. Whatever image they aspired to, it was not this. The men, no doubt proud of their stern masculine resolve in the face of extremity, exposed their bodies and revealed the limited contents of their nigh-empty heads. It wasn’t big; it wasn’t clever; it certainly wasn’t manly.

Boars in Cashmere

The idiom du jour is the 'pig in lipstick'. What is most striking about the universal understanding of this uncouth image is the degree to which it incorporates some rather large and unchallenged assumptions. The implication, I think, is that women dissemble. Persona and personality do not necessarily coincide, and we should do well to be cautious when making character judgments of the beneficiaries of makeovers (tax-payer funded or otherwise). Why is this such a female figuration? Are men presumed so straightforward, so bereft of guile, as to be incapable of aesthetic deceipt? Is male character so eminently discernible from the stripes on a suit, the direction of sail derived wholly from the cut of a jib?

We should be foolish to answer in the affirmative. Dressing properly (this is not a prescription, as will become abundantly clear in future posts; I refer merely to deliberateness of choice, not to the weave of one's weskit), is simply incompatible with dressing as if sweeping the dirt under a rug. Clothes do not make the man (so goes the adage), but neither should they obfuscate the character. It is simply dishonest to portray in fabric what one is not in flesh.

Of course, this is not to acquiesce in the other great assumption of the rouged sow image: that 'pigs' cannot be reformed. There is nothing eternal in character, but only what one cultivates and safeguards. For all those boars about to don cashmere on Christmas, spare a moment to ponder the softness, the gentility, which befits it.