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?!?!?!

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.