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.