Rules of the Style Vortex: Bow Ties Should ONLY Ever Be Worn With a Tuxedo

Forget Tinie Tempah and whichever other flash in the pan pop star is currently doing a fashion shoot for a men’s mag: all you need to know about bow ties is encapsulated in the episode of the Inbetweeners where Simon gets a girlfriend, they go shopping together and she somehow convinces him that he would look good kitted out as a sort of day-glo nightmare version of Brains from Thunderbirds, resplendent in purple with a matching bow tie. Even Will, the acknowledged über-nerd of the quartet, does a double take when he sees his friend before pausing for a fraction of a second and, in a tone of deep concern, saying ‘who did this to you?’

So, should you have any pretensions towards wearing a bow tie, in the wholly misplaced belief that it will make you look like some kind of super-cool urbane dandy, simply remember that no matter what you think you may look like, you will look like Simon from the Inbetweeners. If you find yourself in this position, remove the bow tie immediately. Do not return it to the shop. Someone else could buy it. Do not put it in the bin. The binmen may see it. Certainly don’t hide it under your bed. You could die, and somebody could discover it.

Tuxedos naturally require a bow tie, but that is the only time they should ever be worn. Even then it can be controversial as these days cases of tuxedo wearing seem almost entirely confined to students at their graduation balls thinking that wearing a tux makes them James Bond. Hmm… Which film in the series is it where James Bond gets drunk on five pints of Fosters then throws up on his shoes?

You can probably get away with wearing one if you are a middle aged college lecturer who suspiciously never married. But the only real reason you should contemplate wearing one is because the t-shirt shop has run out of t-shirts that say ‘I AM A PAEDOPHILE’.

Worrying Style Trends: The Christmas Jumper

For some time now I’ve harboured a fantasy of somehow hijacking a major magazine and starting a campaign of stylistic terrorism that involves coming up with the most ridiculous fashion ideas I can possibly think of and then using my position within the magazine to convince its readers that whatever I’ve come up with, no matter how ridiculous it may be, is a genuine up-and-coming trend. One month I could tell them that the clown look is in and they should stock up on curly wigs and oversized shoes, and another I could convince them that all the celebs in LA are going crazy for luminous codpieces and that they should get one before they sell out.

I think it would be pretty easy; once in power I’d simply set up a fashion shoot with a suitably empty headed celebrity, pretend to be a leading stylist, dress the celebrity up in the ridiculous garb then run it on the fashion pages under a suitable headline like ‘OMG!!!! Pixie Lott dazzles in her luminous codpiece!!! She’s like, really cool?!!! OMG!!!!’ (I assume that anyone who works on a magazine like Cosmopolitan speaks and thinks exclusive in textspeak, with their every utterance peppered with OMG!!!s and LOL!!!s, though I confess I don’t have any concrete evidence to support this suspicion).

However, in recent months I’ve come to suspect that somebody has beaten me to this, and that cultural hackers are already working in deep cover at most, if not all, of the style magazines and fashion houses. My suspicions were initially aroused by an issue of Esquire a few months back that ran a piece that featured chav-rapper Professor Green modelling chunky knitwear, which, as far as I could tell, was meant to be taken seriously. But that was only the beginning.

For many years now there has been a yuletide tradition of hideous sweaters being given as presents by elderly and confused relatives and the unfortunate recipients then being required to wear them for the rest of Christmas until the elderly relative has gone home and the monstrous garment can be given to a charity shop or destroyed. Now, however, it would seem that a number of shops and magazines have decided that those very jumpers are in fact now the very height of fashion and should be worn through choice rather than under extreme duress.

Whilst I would love to believe that this startling trend really is the result of the aforementioned style anarchists setting out to subvert the whole fashion industry, I have an uneasy feeling that it is not. I suspect that many people in powerful and influential positions within the fashion industry, bizarrely, believe that there is a place for such garments in civilised society.

But if you have any doubts as to whether I am right here, I have a challenge for you. This posting is decorated by various pictures of sweaters. Some of them are garments currently available from well-known high street retailers; others are ones I found photos of by Googling ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’. I have removed them from their context. Now, can you honestly say that (a) you can identify which ones are high street brands and which are sweaters your gran would buy and (b) you would actually wear any of them?

I do not believe you can. So if you open your presents on Christmas morning and are unfortunate to receive one of these, say you like it, wear it for the rest of the day but, by God, make sure it’s thrown on the fire first thing on Boxing Day.

Icons of the Style Vortex: Carlos D (and the Sad Decline of Interpol)

Watching this year’s Reading Festival I couldn’t help but be reminded of that quote along the lines of, ‘you either die a hero or stay around long enough to become a villain’. I think it was from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietszche. Or it might have been from one of the Spiderman films. But regardless of its true source, I never felt it to be more true than when I watched Interpol’s performance on the Sunday afternoon. The musicianship wasn’t that bad, even if it seemed that they were at times running through the motions, and seemed to largely base their setlist on their second album, Antics, (aka The Interpol Album That Everyone Has), but what was more worrying, nay, disturbing, was the decline in their sense of style.

When they burst onto the scene in the middle of the last decade they were the last word in New York cool; whilst the predictable indie kids dutifully did what the NME told them and worshipped the Strokes we must never as a society forget that not only did that band peddle nothing but skinny-trousered, tousle-haired, trust-funded clichés (of both the musical and sartorial varieties) but that they would give rise to the reprehensible Razorlight and, even worse, the Kooks, a band whose existence surely ranks amongst the Western world’s greatest shames. (Indeed, I can only hope that the painfully skinny jeans that Razorlight and the Kooks were poured into were part of a secretive conspiracy to cut off the blood flow to their nether regions and ensure they were unable to procreate; after all, who wants to live in a world where the likes of Johnny Borrell and Luke Pritchard are allowed to propagate their genes?)

Interpol, however, were different; gaining extra kudos for being a New York band whose singer was born in Clacton-On-Sea (which is far cooler than being born in, say, LA) they also had a unique stylistic trump card in their hand in the form of bassist Carlos Dengler, aka Carlos D. He was far too cool to lower himself to wearing skinny jeans or the sort of t-shirts that are meant to look second hand but are invariably from pretentious Lower East Side boutiques that only trustafarians can afford to shop in, and instead forged ahead with his own unique style that took the form of a quasi-fascist look involving ties and waistcoats, a striking combination of blacks and reds, gun holsters, armbands and vaguely Hitlerish hair. A kind of Nazi Rock Dandy, if you will. His idiosyncratic flair, along with his aloof stage persona and low slung bass guitar led him to become the most famous member of the band, despite not being the singer.

But at Reading, everything had changed. With Carlos D having left the band the year before they seemed to have lost their way not only musically but stylistically. The new bassist looked confused in his charity shop suit and whilst Sam Fogarino and Daniel Kessler were trying their best to keep the look going, singer Paul Banks had bizarrely opted to wear a tracksuit. What happened? Did he leave his suit at the dry cleaners? Did he not want to risk getting it dirty in a festival? Or did he just become enamoured of Oasis and decide that adopting their look was the way forward?

Well, whatever the reason, it could now be an uphill struggle for the band. As for Carlos, he has now retired much of his extravagant look, claiming it was best suited to a rock star and he now prefers the anonymity of not dressing quite so flamboyantly. But perhaps a future as the alt-rock Gok Wan beckons, teaching confused rockers to develop a new sense of style? And, let’s face it, there are plenty of people who could do with his help. He could start with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; how can you not like anyone who has, in the press, advised that overblown, overage and overweight pitiful excuse for a rock star to ‘stop looking like a homophobic, misogynistic date-rapist jock from Michigan’?

Amen, brothers.

Eleven Points About Beards

In recent years, trendy East London has seen an unprecedented surge in the number of men wearing unkempt and wild beards. The beard is, of course, a personal choice; however, when making this choice I would beg you to consider the following:

1) Renowned beard enthusiasts include Harold Shipman, Peter Sutcliffe, Noel Edmunds, Charles Manson, Abu Hamza and Bin Laden along with a) your friendly neighbourhood tramp and b) your less friendly neighbourhood rapist.

2) No one has yet managed to improve upon the beard as the most effective design for capturing bits of everything you have eaten in the last week and storing them in one place. (Do you not remember Mr Twit from The Twits by Roald Dahl? Shame on you.)

3) The beard is a time-honoured way of ensuring that any young lady who attempts to kiss you will end up looking like she tried to exfoliate her face using barbed wire. (Some women claim to like beards; but then some women write to serial killers on death row and end up marrying them. Are these the same women? I would assume so.)

4) When Joaquim Phoenix sported a luxuriant beard as part of his art terrorist hoax that involved him claiming to have turned into a rapper, and made a number of bizarre chat show appearances in support of this, he was widely assumed to have gone insane.

5) Growing a beard on the grounds that ‘it’s the natural look’ is on a par with never cutting your nails, wearing the same clothes for a month, sleeping in your own urine and not wiping your bottom, all because ‘it’s the natural look’. Tramps go for ‘the natural look’ yet they are rarely held up as arbitrators of style.

6) Birds will probably build their nests in it. I would imagine.

7) The whole trendy East London beardy thing possibly came about due to the influence of rapper Scroobius Pip but he freely admits that he grew it as a result of a period spent living in his car. And he added that it did lead to people challenging him in pubs on the grounds that he was a terrorist or some other undesirable.

8) Continuing the terrorist/hate preacher theme (for they are much the same thing in the eyes of the mainstream media), if you are considering the beard look, ask yourself this: would you expand the whole look to encapsulate the Abu Hamza look including a hook for a hand, a wooden leg and a parrot on your shoulder? (I’ve a feeling he doesn’t actually have all those things but can never remember which one is the odd one out).

9) Goatees are probably due to be announced as the next big thing, but, based on the roll call of those who sport them, I suspect that they are actually pretty cool. If they are, and you decide to grow one, remember that the Goatee Wearers Hall of Fame includes: Marvin Hagler (renowned boxer), Ming the Merciless (interplanetary uber-fascist and foe of Flash Gordon), Anton LaVey (founder of the Church of Satan), Dave Navarro (rock guitarist and seducer of sexy ladies), George Michael (singer and cottaging enthusiast) and Derren Brown (he has magic powers).

10) The only person for whom the unkempt beard works is Alan Moore but he is an evil genius and powerful magician, and has been on the Simpsons, so is therefore far cooler than you will ever be. And if you don’t know who he is, you simply aren’t cool enough, and that is why you are here.

11) Obviously none of the above applies if you are Brian Blessed.

Rules of the Style Vortex: A stupid haircut that appears on a model in an advert is still a stupid haircut

Do not be fooled; as will be discussed later, style magazines should be regarded with deep mistrust as they are simply peddling whatever their advertisers tell them to peddle. And if you have any doubts, view these fine specimens. This one is apparently from Topman. But what were the stylists possibly thinking?!?! ‘Hmm, maybe if we took Jim Carrey’s look from Dumb and Dumber but do it in bleach blonde, that will be a good look, won’t it?’

And as for this one… Well, I had no idea that Vanilla Ice had become a fashion guru once he’d spent all the royalties from his hit record. Shame on you, Dior, for you should know better.

Uniqlo, however, decided to put famed TV scarecrow Wurzel Gummidge in charge of this campaign, though...

Jasper Carrott once bemoaned his baldness but admitted maybe God makes you bald as punishment for one too many terrible haircuts... And who is to say that he is wrong?!?

The Manifesto of the Style Vortex

First of all, I didn’t want to write this.

But I look around me and I am disturbed by what I see. I see a lost generation wearing elbow patches on their jackets because they think it’s cool. I see people in fashion magazines wearing bow ties because they think it’s, like, really cool. I see young people dressing however that week’s flash in the pan X-factor contestant is wearing with absolutely no idea of how ridiculous they look. And I realised that we live in worrying times when people will wear practically anything just because a style magazine tells them to or because a celebrity is wearing it. I realised our world is one where people have lost their way and have long since been abandoned by any ability to make judgements for themselves.

And I realised you need my help.

Foolish middlebrow minds like to think we learn from history. But there’s only one thing that history really teaches us, and that’s that we never learn from history. And nowhere is this more evident than in the history of fashion. You may look back at kipper ties, flares, poodle perms, puffa jackets, neon leg warmers, huge shoulder pads or even shell suits and think that if you had been around at the time you would have noticed how ridiculous they looked and think that if you had been around at the time you wouldn’t have worn them.

But you would have. You would have worn them because everyone else was and because you were told they were cool. Remember, no one spoke out against the atrocity of the shell suit until it was too late. When one lone voice spoke out, others awoke from their trance and before long a chorus had built up decrying the shell suit as one worst crimes in the history of human civilisation. But only when that lone voice had spoken out first.

So forget everything you know about whether something is in fashion or not. Forget whether something is coming in or going out. Something either looks good or it doesn’t. And that’s all there is to it.

So welcome to the place where that lone voice cries out.

Welcome to the end of all illusion and the birthplace of the real.

Welcome to the Style Vortex.