Some Musings on the Placement of Menswear Departments Within High Street Stores

It may not be very PC, but can I say that I don’t see why men always have to walk through the women’s section in clothes shops in order to get to the men’s stuff? After all, women will crawl over broken glass to save a few pence on a designer bag, whilst men are famously lazy when it comes to shopping, so it doesn't make sense that shops expect men to make more effort and always put the women’s section on the ground floor. 

I appreciate that stores spend large amounts of money employing psychologists to study the shopping habits and patterns of humans so they can work out what music to play and how to lay the shop out, but if they’re such experts why don’t they realise that if a man enters a shop looking to buy some new socks but is faced with having to fight through a zombie-like army of women scratching and clawing each other over slightly reduced sale items, he’s simply going to abandon his trip and go home?!

The Chequered History of Check Shirts

I should first of all say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with check shirts. They may be a bit boring and predictable, the kind of thing you might casually throw on if you rush out of the house without having time to think of anything more interesting to wear, or something you might wear if you were going painting and decorating, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. And, in case you’re wondering, I have worn them myself, but this was well before their recent revival, at the end of the ‘90s when they weren’t considered cool, partly due to their ubiquity during the Grunge Wars.

But whilst considering the history of the check shirt, I struck upon an revolutionary idea: whilst fashion is largely random and frequently undergoes Stalinist purges of its own history, I wondered if it would be possible to undertake a statistical study of a particular garment, analysing the data and seeing if they can be used to predict its future fashionability. Has this ever been done before? Well, in order to find out, here is a graph showing the coolness of check shirts since the end of the 1960s. Don’t worry; I’ve shown my working:

1968-72: Checked shirt pretty cool as most bands are wearing bizarre hippy clothes; it could be argued that Neil Young and Creedence Clearwater Revival were proto punk in stripping down their look in protest of hippy ridiculousness. Although in Neil Young’s case it may be that, being Canadian, he was a child lumberjack so simply carried the look on stage.

1972–76: Neil Young’s career goes mainstream and bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath pioneer proto-metal alternative ways to challenge hippy looks. Coolness of check shirts declines.

1977-81: Occasional but inconsistent sightings amongst punk and post punk bands lead to check shirt becoming slightly more cool.

1982-87: All time high in check shirt coolness as a result of legendary US alt-rock band the Replacements almost exclusively wearing them as they challenge mainstream radio sounds, lay the foundation for alternative rock and date Winona Ryder back when she was young and not a kleptomaniac (this refers to the band’s singer, Paul Westerberg, rather than the group as a whole dating her).

1987-1990: Decline in check shirt coolness apart from brief surge in 1990 as Replacements release their final album, All Shook Down, seen by many as the first alt-country album.

1991-1996: Check shirt woefully uncool due to appropriation by grunge fans mistaking their teenage sexual frustration for existential angst, subsequently dressing like tramps and making check shirts unwearable by any style conscious person for the next five years.

1997: The end of Grunge; fortunes of the check shirt rise as alt-country gains pace following the success of Wilco and Whiskeytown. This continues into the next decade as Whiskeytown’s Ryan Adams goes solo and continues with the check shirt look.

2007: The Hold Steady wear check shirts and their coolness is maintained for a bit longer.

2010: Check shirt goes mainstream again and everyone is seen wearing them.

2011: Disaster. Prepubescent singing sensation Dustin Beaver is spotted wearing a check shirt, potentially rendering them uncool for the rest of eternity.

So, from this graph, can we tell if it will ever be cool to wear check shirts again? The sighting of Dustin Beaver in a check shirt can be seen as the sartorial equivalent of a devastating stock market crash but who can say how long lasting its effects will be? The check shirt has shown its resilience to fluctuations in the market before so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it make a comeback, even if not for a few decades. Remember, past performance is no indication of future success…

Some Observations on Fashion Since the Style Vortex Began

Now that the Style Vortex has been casting its critical gaze around the fashion landscape for over a year I thought it might be worth taking stock and raking over previous posts to see if, as it set out to do, the Vortex managed to cut through the grime of the fashion world like some sort of really good metaphorical cleaning product. And, looking back, I’m more than happy to see that the Vortex has remained consistent! Let’s look at a few things…

Where did all the duffel coats go? I can only hope that everyone who bought one read the post (I suppose it could happen) and, stung by the Paddington Bear comparisons, discarded them instantly. I haven’t seen any in charity shops, though, which makes me wonder if people who bought them simply burned them in their gardens to forever rid themselves of their shame.

The bow tie and elbow patches are still occasionally seen, but it looks like they’re near to extinction. Phew! Emergency over.

The Christmas jumper, interestingly enough, stayed around for two seasons. On the one hand I’m disappointed that after we first saw people wearing them in a vaguely ironic way back in Christmas 2011 they were still being worn and written about during Christmas 2012, though I suspect the people who thought they were cool for wearing them in 2011 looked down upon people wearing them in 2012. But the Christmas jumper has certainly travelled a strange path, going from being a stupid thing that no one in their right mind would wear to a stupid thing that trendy people wore to a stupid thing that lots of stupid people wore. But I am proud, and more than a little smug, to say that I have remained untainted and never worn one. At Christmas time I just stick to my Homer Simpson slippers. They’ll always be cool.

And double denim, as I suggested, was proven to work! Back in April I said that, despite it being considered style anathema by so many, I believed it could be successful, perhaps by using darker colours rather than light blue. And by the end of the year it was widely agreed that it could work! It was in the style pages of Men’s Health and everything.

This isn’t all about gloating, though. It’s nice to see that top celebrities have been reading the blog, particularly Paul Weller who has at least now had some decent suits made on Saville Row. He’s still got a stupid haircut, though.

Some Musings on a Visit to Liam Gallagher's Boutique

Whilst the idea of Liam Gallagher designing a line of clothes and being seen as some sort of style icon struck me as being about as appropriate as Wayne Rooney opening an institute for the study of molecular biology (or, indeed, as appropriate as Liam Gallagher opening an institute for the study of molecular biology) I did actually go into his boutique, Pretty Green, once. But with justification: there was an exhibition about the Who’s Quadrophenia taking place downstairs.

But as soon as I’d got in there, I was struck by something profoundly odd: everyone working in there (or at least all the men) seemed to be Liam Gallagher clones; it appeared that the chief requirement of anyone seeking employment there was to already hold him up as the greatest style icon the world has ever known, so monkey-style basin haircuts and predictable mod clothing were the order of the day.

I was quite surprised by this; did Liam really insist that anyone in his shop had to ape his sense of style? Or were they given makeovers upon being recruited? Or was it a ‘Boys from Brazil’ type cloning experiment, where Liam Gallagher had undertaken scientific research (probably with quite a lot of help) to breed a new generation of Mini-Mes to help staff his shop?

Startled, I rushed straight down to the exhibition and although I haven’t been back since I do walk by occasionally. It’s changed now, and there’s a slightly different range of people working in there, not all of whom look like Liam Gallagher. Still, I like the idea of shops where you have to dress or act the same as its founder or designer. For example, Virgin Megastores could have insisted their workers sported a beard and wore a chunky sweater. Or if The Kooples do another collaboration with Pete Doherty they can insist that none of their shop assistants report for work until they’re so drugged up to the eyeballs that they can barely stand.

TWENTY ONE DEGREES: THE TEMPERATURE AT WHICH STYLE BURNS

So, it’s summertime and the Style Vortex is on temporary hiatus. I’m not entirely sure if that’s because men generally abandon any pretence of style in the summer; after all, is it really possible to look cool in shorts and sandals or, god forbid, short sleeved shirts?!?

It’s the opposite problem in the winter: you have to wear so many clothes that it’s equally difficult to be stylish. Winter coats have to be heavy and even if you think layering is the solution there’s still a serious risk that the number of layers you’re forced to wear will cause your body shape to lose any definition and you’ll become an amorphous mass of clothing and no matter how slender your frame is you might end up with the silhouette of the Michelin Man.

So when is the best time of year to be stylish? Well, it has to Spring or Autumn, when you can get away with wearing two layers; no more and no less. In fact, I’ve come to suspect there’s a perfect temperature to be stylish. I reckon it must be around twenty degrees. Probably no more, though. But whatever this magical temperature is, why do I suspect it only occurs about three days a year?

A Quintet of Worrying Style Trends

Check suits

If you insist on wearing them just make sure you accessorise with an enormous pair of shoes, a giant floppy bow tie and a flower in your lapel that squirts water. This one was in Zara! They really should know better.

The Pocket Square

I’m not saying that the pocket square looks particularly bad, but I would beg you to consider its origins. For a pocket square is essentially a decorative handkerchief. And the handkerchief is the physical expression of the idea that it’s acceptable to expel fluid from your body and then, rather than immediately throwing it away, carry it around with you for the rest of the day. Obviously, I could extend that idea in a more revolting direction but in the name of public decency I’m not going to. But, before you place that handkerchief in your top pocket it’s something you may wish to consider.

Super Skinny Jeans

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for well fitted clothes and opposed to bagginess, but you can take the term ‘well-fitted’ too far. Super skinny trousers may be hot on girls but on guys they’re just plain weird. And what if you’re attacked and need to defend yourself with a kung fu kick? Any respect earned by your bravado will immediately be cancelled out by the fact you’ll tear a hole in your trousers and everyone will be able to see your pants.

African Tribal Print Shirts

Somewhat worryingly, GQ have mentioned these a few times as the next in thing. But you will surely have noticed that the only non-Africans to wear these are late middle aged, upper middle class types who pretend to like world music and think that if they walk down the street in an ‘ethnic’ shirt people will go ‘Look at that person! He obviously has a deep understanding and love for all the world’s cultures and has extensively travelled the world and been respected by tribespeople from Indonesia to Zambia!’ even though he has actually spent every day of his adult life going to work in a drab civil service building in Luton.

Plus, you will look like TV 'eccentric' Adam Hart Davis.

Tweed

It’s totally acceptable to wear tweed if you are over 75, or a farmer, or an inbred type who divides his time between Buckinghamshire and Fulham and who travels from one to the other in a Range Rover, and has a braying laugh that makes him sound like some sort of retarded donkey. If you are not one of those people, however, you may wish to avoid it, mainly because it’s very itchy.

The Style Vortex’s Guide to People Who Are Seemingly Condemned to Never Be Stylish - Number 1: Paul Weller

I think it’s fair to say that where style is concerned it’s far worse to try too hard than to not try at all. I mean, surely it’s better to go out in jeans and a t-shirt than hit the town wearing luminous trousers, a Steps t-shirt, a shell suit jacket and yellow wellington boots just because The Face told you they were all the in thing that week? So for this, the first in a planned series of Style Vortex Guides to People Who Are Seemingly Condemned to Never Be Stylish I’d like to look at how this applies to king of the faux-mods and inventor of retro, Paul Weller.

For much of his career Weller lifted both his fashion and music sensibilitiesfrom an earlier era, whether he was stealing the look and sound of the mid ‘60s during his Jam years (The Who’s Union Jack suits and the Beatles’ riffs) or borrowing wholesale from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s during his early solo career (John Lennon glasses and Traffic/Blind Faith sound). However, in the 1980s he not only adopted a soul-lite sound that gave him all the edginess of Sade, but then proceeded to jump on pretty much every terrible fashion bandwagon of the era; it was a classic case of trying too hard, with the end result being that he sported a catalogue of atrocious looks that made him the number one contender for Fashion Victim of the Decade. And considering that this was the 1980s, famously The Decade That Style Forgot, that’s some achievement. And the name of the band he led for much of this period? The Style Council! Has a band ever been so woefully misnamed?!

If you’re going to slavishly follow everything the style magazines tell you to do then historically there was no worse time to do it then during the 1980s, but that didn’t stop Weller and his equally sartorially hapless bandmate from committing a never-ending range of sartorial crimes. At various points these included wearing chunky knits and roll necks (making them look like the presenter of the Fast Show’s Jazz Club a good decade before that character was even invented), doing the faux-French ‘jerseys over the shoulders’ look and even going to such bizarre lengths as dressing as sailors and Prohibition-era gangsters.

Since the end of the ‘90s Weller’s dress sense seems not to have changed; he reverted to the mod suit look of his early twenties, leading me to wonder if he finally realised that it was virtually impossible for him to commit any more fashion crimes as he’d already covered pretty much all of them. But if that’s the case, what about his hair?!? In his Style Council days he sported, variously, the wedge, the slicked back look and even bleached highlights but in the ‘90s he somehow managed to top all those by deciding to have a basin. Yes, a basin, the hairstyle worn by the kids you were at school with who had so many siblings that their mum would cut their hair at home to save money and did so by sitting them down in the kitchen, placing a bowl on their heads and snipping around it. And Weller chose to have this look?!? The mind boggles!

Having spent so long trying too hard in the fashion stakes one can fully understand Weller’s decision not to have changed his look since 1998 but even though the mod look he now sports is every bit as unoriginal as when he did it during his Jam days, the hair remains a mystery. I mean, look at it! It’s kind of a feathered mullet of the sort that a particularly gullible person might get talked into when they visit Toni and Guy, to not realise how ridiculous it looks until they’ve got home. But he’s had it for over ten years! Hasn’t he even noticed it’s the same as the ‘comedy’ hairstyle worn by the painfully unfunny stand up Paul Foot? So I can only think of one possibility: his hair must have fallen out some years back, possibly as a result of bleaching it or maybe due to baldness and, in the same way that some people spend a ridiculous amount of money on a haircut and then, because of how expensive it was, refuse to accept how stupid it looks, he spent all of his money on a wig and has since refused to come to terms with how bizarre it looks and thus continued to wear it. And I know that sounds a bit far fetched but, seriously, when you look at his hair can you think of any more plausible explanation?!

Four Style Trends I Can't Quite Make My Mind Up About

Double Denim

On one hand, you’ll be following in the footsteps of musical behemoths such as Shakin’ Stevens and B*Witched. But despite that, I reckon it can work, though if you’re going to try it perhaps go for black denim rather than blue, just to steer away from the Shaky look.

(Just had a thought: what if one day Shakin Stevens succumbs to some sort of motor neurone disease and is unable to prevent himself from shaking? That would be a pretty cruel irony.)

Aviators

I’m pretty sure they’re cool. I have a pair myself. And people have been wearing them since the 1940s or thereabouts without them going out of fashion. All the same, I have a sneaking suspicion they may actually be a bit too big, and are only a step away from the sort of massively oversized sunglasses that were popular amongst women a couple of years ago because they saw Sarah Jessica Parker and Kate Moss wearing them, subsequently getting excited to the point of hysteria and rushing out to buy dozens of pairs whilst clucking ‘OMG!! They’re, like, really cool?!’

One Button Suits

Is one button really enough? I’m not convinced it is. It hardly seems worth doing the jacket up at all so might as well have no buttons (and why do I suspect that will be the next trend?).

Much better to get a two-button suit, then even if one falls off you’ll still have a trendy one button suit.

Trenchcoats

The in thing, according to this week’s Shortlist magazine. It’s probably worth bearing in mind the whole flasher thing, though. In your mind’s eye you might resemble Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in 1960s West Berlin, pulling up your collar whilst heading off to meet a defector who’ll surely provide you with some priceless titbits about the Soviets’ attempts to smuggle uranium. But there’s also a possibility that you’ll look like the strange man in the park who waits until young girls are walking by before leaping out from behind a bush, flinging open his grimy mac to reveal he’s wearing nothing underneath and screaming ‘Woahahahahaha!!!!!’

Just a thought.

GQ's Worst Dressed Men in the World

First of all, can I say what an absolute pleasure it is to see such negativity coming from a mainstream publication?! The style mags are usually the number one culprits where hyping up ridiculous looks is concerned, shamelessly promoting whatever fad the latest flash in the pan E-list celebrity is promoting in the hope it will get them an exclusive interview yet here we see the unashamed slagging off of public figures whose sense of style is utterly wretched. Long may this continue!

You can read the piece here:

 GQ Worst Dressed Men in the World

My observations are as follows:

10. Ollie Locke

I have absolutely no idea who this person is. He does, however, bear a passing resemblance to Lorenzo Lamas (star of 90s TV series Renegade) and if I were pushed to guess I would say he was a gay porn star.

9. Jamie Oliver

To be fair to him, his wardrobe is probably struggling to keep up with his weight gain.

8. Douglas Alexander

Don’t know who this is either but, in all fairness to him, who expects politicians to be stylish?

7. An Orange Man off the Only Way is Essex

Read the description for number 8 but replace ‘politicians’ with ‘people from Essex’. Did you know it’s a legal requirement for all women in Essex to own at least three leopard print garments? The police actually have the right to enter your house without a warrant if they suspect you don’t.

6. A Man from Mumford and Sons

GQ says it’s inappropriate for a public schoolboy to appropriate the look of America’s Deep South but I think those two groups have more in common than people realise. Insular communities with strange rituals that are a mystery to outsiders? Check. Strangely elongated vowels? Check. Incest and inbreeding? All present and correct.

5. A Man from Abercrombie and Fitch

Think I’ll skip this one as I don’t know who’s who in the photo.

4. Mr Dappy

This is the guy who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings, I assume? Well, they’ve done well to get him wearing any sort of clothes.

3. Robbie Savage

The Lidl version of David Beckham? I certainly didn’t say that. Okay, I certainly did just say that.

2. Steve Hilton

A man from politics, apparently. Still, there’s probably little point trying to dress stylishly when you look like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

1. Chris Brown

Crikey. Baggy clothes, sportswear and more than one bow tie. Simple maths would suggest if you get it wrong so many times you must eventually get it right. But in his case that seems not to be the case.

Underpants, Overpants, Wombling Free AKA A Tricky Moral Dilemma Pertaining to Underpants

Morality is a notoriously tricky thing. For whilst some choices you have to make have a fairly clear right and wrong answer, there are other dilemmas to which the solution is unclear to point of being baffling. Indeed, sometimes it’s all but impossible to tell whether there even are right and wrong choices at all.

For example, every now and then I give away my old and unwanted clothes (I know, it’s very generous of me, but I like to think of it as a small gesture towards helping those less fortunate than myself to at least come vaguely close to aping my incredible sense of style). However, as I gather the retired garments together and put them into a bag I also wonder what should be sent to the charity shop/clothing bank and what should simply be thrown away. The main moral dilemma here is that of underpants. I appreciate, on one hand, that when you throw away a pair of pants it’s usually because they’re worn and soiled to the point of near destruction, but then I’m sure that a freezing tramp, when faced with a choice between spending a night on the streets in a torn pair of trousers and a jumper full of holes or doing so in the nude with opt for the former. Beggars can’t be choosers indeed.

So, if I were forced to make a decision, I would assume the same to be true of pants. Surely it’s better to have someone’s old and decrepit pants than to be forced to go commando? But I fully realise that this is morally dubious area, and that I really have no idea what the right thing to do is. When the prim, middle aged ladies who volunteer at charity shops open the bags of donations that have been left outside, do they recoil in horror if they discover one of them to contain an aged pair of undergarments, tut and go, ‘well, honestly! Do people really think we want their old pants?!’ Or is it a completely different situation? Is there an African village somewhere in which once a month the elders send their fastest and fittest runner to the nearest city, hundreds of miles away, in order to collect donations from a charity, let a week pass, then wait in anticipation when they see him on the horizon, their expectations growing all the time, only for him to arrive, crestfallen, and announce sadly, ‘there were… No pants...’?

So, it’s a tricky area, as you can see. I’m no closer to resolving it. There is one more thing to consider, and that’s that if clothes are not in a fit state to sell or give away the fabric can still be recycled. But into what, exactly?! Other clothes? Cloths? If that’s the case, would you really want to wear something made out of my old pants? Or clean the floor with cloths made out of my worn out undercrackers?!?! The mind boggles, and the public need to be told!!!

Worrying Style Trends: The Duffel Coat

There is a simply system for ascertaining whether or not you should wear a duffel coat, and it involves pondering the following points:

Are you:
a) Seven years old?
b) Paddington Bear?
c) A seven year old fan of Paddington Bear?

If you have answered ‘yes’ to any of the above you may wear a duffel coat. Otherwise, you probably shouldn’t. I mean, what next? Are you going to get yellow tartan trousers and a matching scarf and dress like Rupert Bear? Or maybe go for the Donald Duck look and put on a sailor’s outfit and hat, yet inexplicably forget to accessorise them with any trousers?! Or just go out dressed in a Tellytubbies costume?!?! I mean, what next?!?!

Icons of the Style Vortex: Brett Anderson (and a Lengthy Treatise on Rock Star Baldness)

It occurred to me the other day that there just aren’t that many bald rock stars. Sure, there are some but compared to the male population in general there are disproportionately few. Indeed, the surviving members of the 60s generation – Jagger, Richards, Clapton, Young, Daltrey, McCartney – have such a fine set of luxuriant barnets that I almost wonder if the famous ‘60s casualties of the ’27 Club’ (Hendrix, Jones, Morrison) were deliberately bumped off by their bandmates for showing signs of balding. I know Pete Townshend is bald, but he probably played his guitar so loud that it simply blew all his hair off.

The alt-rock generation, it has to be said, hasn’t fared quite so well; Michael Stipe, the Pixies and Billy Corgan have all long since abandoned any pretence of hair and forged a new alt-rock baldy style whilst Bob Mould of Husker Du and Sugar fame has gone for the compensatory baldy-beardy look, which I’m not sure is always a good idea because growing hair on your chin to make up for not having it on your head does tend to make it look like you’ve put your head on upside down.

But one member of the ‘90s music crowd whose hair is still impressive as he enters middle age is Brett Anderson, once and future singer with Suede. I saw him once, in what was admittedly a pretty incongruous place to spot a formerly androgynous, drug addicted neo-glam rocker, as it was at Hampton Court Palace with his wife and kids. But despite the unusual location, he still managed to look stylish and he exuded an air of charisma that I picked up on before I realised who he was.

On one hand, you could argue that it wasn’t difficult to make a style statement in early ‘90s Britain as the music world was in thrall to Madchester, a uniquely style-free musical movement whose adherents laboured under the bizarre belief that sportswear is something that should ever be worn in a non-sporting setting (missing out on the subtle clue within the name that indicates when it should be worn: when you are playing SPORTS. You see how that works? The only other reason it should be worn is if you spend your entire life watching Jeremy Kyle and are trying to get Channel Five to make a documentary about you called Britain’s Fattest Bastard.)

So when Brett and his cohorts emerged from the Camden scene with their slightly gothic, nonchalantly decadent and elegantly wasted image, they were always going to stand out. Brett’s look may not have been particularly complex – basically an unbuttoned charity shop shirt tucked into skinny trousers and topped off with a fitted leather jacket and the ever-present cigarette – but he always made it look effortless. Even now, Brett is still whippet thin, in possession of a full and thick head of hair and, as the recent Suede reunion concerts showed, his basic look is one that grows old gracefully; he effortlessly pulled off the relatively simple look of a white shirt and tailored suit, showing that some people have a natural sense of style and charisma and you can still be stylish as you enter middle age. (If only all rock stars could master the art of growing old gracefully; I’m particularly looking forward to seeing if Placebo are still going in ten years’ time and, more importantly, whether anyone will take Brian Molko to one side and quietly explain that it’s not really a good idea to persevere with an androgynous sex pixie look when you’re almost fifty and the growth of your double chin is inversely proportionate to the decline in your hairline).

Although Suede’s moment in the sun was too brief, it was a vital kick up the backside for the staid styles of indie fashion; the next big thing for the music press was Oasis, who returned to the sportswear look and contributed to the steady decline in bands looking cool that would reach its nadir ten years later with the hugely over stylised skinny-trousered look of Razorlight and other terrible and contrived bands whose entire image was stage managed by an army of stylists to be as blandly inoffensive as possible. For we will always need bands to show us how to be stylish, and it’s a good warning sign that if a band look boring their music will be boring too, and their fans in turn. After all, would you rather be surrounded by the Beautiful Ones at a Suede gig or find yourself trapped in a sea of identikit, sportswear-clad chav-cattle Oasis fans who are likely to rob you at the end of the show?!

Worrying Style Trends: Elbow Patches

In the world of style there’s perhaps nothing more disappointing than witnessing a ridiculous trend appear and be adopted by a gullible few, then seeing it quickly vanish only to re-emerge a few months later being sported by practically everyone. It’s particularly distressing when it’s the kind of look that’s so ridiculous that the people who have adopted it because it’s popular are the very same people who would have mocked anyone who sported the look only a few months earlier.

And there is no better example of this than the current bizarre trend for elbow patches. Around May or June last year I noticed someone wearing them and thought it was an odd but isolated case, but then over the next three days I saw another four or five people sporting them around Carnaby Street. But then they disappeared as quickly as they had arrived and I naturally assumed that the people wearing them had realised how ridiculous they looked and destroyed the offending garments.

But a few months later they came back with a vengeance. And this time it was not only the trendies. It was everyone. What was going on? I’d initially wondered if Shoreditch types had misunderstood the humorous intention of the episode of the Mighty Boosh in which Howard launches his very own elbow patch line (The Howard Moon Elite Elbow Patch Collection, I believe) and taken this to be an indication of where trendy Hoxton fashion was heading, but it soon became apparent it was something bigger and altogether more alarming.

Now, the first thing I have to say about elbow patches is that I’d always assumed they were invented to prolong the life of jackets whose elbows had become worn due to their wearer spending too long using their elbows to prop up binoculars, either due to extensive birdwatching or, as is more likely, as a result of them spending hours using binoculars to spy on their neighbours whilst they got undressed. Other groups who enthusiastically adopted the elbow patch include college lecturers and driving instructors, both groups renowned for largely being made up of middle aged men with an unhealthy interest in teenage girls. Either way, there is no better indicator of a sexual deviant than if they are wearing elbow patches.

The other thing to bear in mind is that elbow patches are a method of repairing old clothing; but if your jacket has holes in it that’s a sign that you should throw it out rather than attempting to plug the hole. If your car had a massive hole in the roof, would you try to attach another piece of metal to it or accept that the scrapyard was calling? Frankly, people who wear elbow patches are no different from those who would repair their glasses using sellotape. So if you wear them you are either someone too poor to afford new clothes or some sort of sex offender. Now, tell me, is that cool?!?!?!