Style

“Fashion,” quipped Oscar Wilde no doubt in some typically depraved opium laced cigarette smoke tainted, oak panelled gentleman’s drinking den, or possibly even just at the kitchen table one morning, “is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

‘Hey, I like your jacket,’ the girl I used to share an office with said when I returned from getting changed in the toilets once again.

‘What? This old thing?’ I looked at my tattered old leather jacket, with its scratched scuffs across the back, its patches of faded greyness, and the hole along the rim where the stuffing is quietly escaping. ‘Christ, this is over ten years old. It’s been dumped on the floor of a thousand pubs, been soaked in a hundred rainstorms and I’ve sleep both in and on it more than once. It’s absolutely knackered.’

‘Yeah, but people pay a lot of money to get a new leather jacket that looks just like that.’

Style, as someone possibly once said, some of us have it, some of us don’t and some of us couldn’t give a monkey’s either way.

Fashion and one’s general appearance are, unfortunately, not things I find myself able to devote significant amounts of mental or physical activity to. It’s not just the whole process of having to keep up with whatever’s cool, with having to personally trudge up and down the busier end of the shopping streets in over-heated monstrosities of shops playing dire plastic pop music whilst trying to comprehend mystical sizing systems and whatever the difference is between drain-pipe and comfort fit. No, none of those things help, but at the end of the day it’s because, basically, it’s boring.

‘I really like these trousers because they’re so practical,’ said Stu not so long ago sitting in a field in Derbyshire. ‘They dry easily, the pockets are the right depth and in handy places. If I could, I’d just buy multiple pairs of the same.’

Ah, if only it could be so easy.

Men’s fashion: Dull as shit-water. Here, I’ll sum it up: Suit or Casual? If suit what colour, what colour shirt, tie or no tie? Right, that’s smart covered. Casual: Trainers or leather shoes (possibly ankle height boots)? Jeans or combats or cords or chino-type other non-descript trousers? In summer cotton slacks or shorts? Top half – t-shirt or shirt? If the latter, long or short sleeved? That is essentially it. We don’t get skirts, dresses, shorts with tights, any imaginable combination of fabric and/or lengthed tops, all in one romper suits, even, stilettos, mid-way heels or knee high boots or any other the other of the trends and products on offer to women. The above are our only choices and when there’s such a limited number of decisions to be taken, what is the point in getting excited by it all?

Okay, so I concede men can wear something more daring than the relatively bland list above – for an example, perhaps pop down Hoxton Square on a Friday night or a sunny Sunday morning and you will, at least, see some examples of hats – but nine times out of ten once you’re passed the age of twenty-one you will look like a complete and utter tit.

‘There comes a point,’ said some random bloke I was chatting to in a bar just off Old Street, ‘when you are just too old to wear jeans. It’s probably the same moment when you have to stop listening to punk.’

A couple of months ago, my old friend Ben and I were busy drinking outside the Market Porter underneath the bundling railway arches of London Bridge. I can’t remember how we got onto the topic, but it was late and we’d both had a few.

‘Apparently,’ he said rather indiscreetly, ‘that jacket had a lot to do with it.’
I looked down at my leather jacket not entirely surprised. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, she couldn’t stand it.’

‘Huh,’ I snorted and took a slug of ale, ‘well, at least it was over something important, then.’

A couple of Saturdays back, I’d been running an exhibition stand dressed in the regulation all-black of a modern waiter. It was the last day of the show and only a couple of us were prepared to hang around to tear the stand apart at the end. We packed it up ferociously, rapidly, desperate to get out of the hall, and after an hour of wheeling boxes of branded tat around I was feeling a little sweaty. Afterwards, we popped for a well-deserved pint. I couldn’t stay as was heading to a friend’s for dinner but I was conscious that I looked like a sweltering mush of a man.

Fortunately, I’d come prepared.

Standing in the toilets of the Steam Passage on Upper Street I took my dirty shirt off and, using damp paper tissues, washed my torso.

‘All right?’ I nodded to the bloke who came in for a pee.

I dried myself off with the black shirt, sprayed some deodorant on and put on a clean shirt I’d been carrying around with me all day. Feeling rather smug with myself I went back to finish my pint.

‘Oh look at you,’ scowled Nicola as I sat down, ‘you can’t even dress yourself.’ And she lent across and rearranged my collar for me.

Once upon a time, it has to be conceded, I was a bit more bothered. In the right circumstances, anyway. When I used to be a sales rep we rarely wore suits to the office – after all, for most of the time I worked there, it was just the three of us – but going out to see clients, impressions were vital. I wore sharp suits with neatly polished shoes and chose the shirt-tie combination around who I was going to see, especially if I knew the colours of their football team. I shaved meticulously, I kept my hair tidy with regular trips to the barbers, the devil of the sale could be in the detail and I didn’t want to let myself down.

These days, it is often noted at work that I rarely bother to iron my shirts or wear a tie. I often haven’t shaved, letting my stubble grow out for a few days and a quarterly hair cut is about as frequent as it gets. As I type this piece it has been almost four months since I last went and visited the friendly Turkish guys who run my barbers. My hair is getting rather bouffant and I sculpted the front into a bit of fifties quiff this morning.

A group of us sat out on the balcony of the Cut towards the beginning of the summer enjoying a beer or two. Somehow we’d gotten to talking about clothes.

‘So, I’m supposed to be going out on dates and I just don’t know what to wear.’ I moaned, sounding a bit pathetic in retrospect. ‘All my clothes just seem so bland and scuzzy and tired.’

‘You’ve got that jacket,’ Amy said, pointing.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ I replied.

‘I think it’s nice. It suits you.’

‘As in: it’s falling apart?’

But there are other sorts of style as well. And there can be times when the style of something overshadows the sum of its component parts. Style over substance.

‘The thing is, David,’ said Justin, ‘I’m just not sure I understand what you’re trying to do here. Is it serving a point, or is it just a stylistic thing?’

He was referring to something I’m experimenting with in my writing, where I am breaking paragraphs apart and using white space on the page to mark a detachment from reality and a drifting passing of time in the lead male’s head, or the compressed franticness in the lead woman’s internal monologue.

‘You’ll be a typesetter’s nightmare, if you keep it,’ said Amy.

Which is fair point and I have just realised this moment that, seeing as I can’t find a way to demonstrate it on this blog since it doesn’t have page breaks or borders, it won’t work on a fucking kindle either.

This is not something unique by any stretch. Nicola Krauss did it a bit in A History of Love, sometimes resorting to a single line on a page. Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries seems to very deliberately replicate a kind of diary layout with personal letters pasted in. Irvine Welsh’s Filth included a sub-narration from the lead character’s tape worm which at times overlaid itself across the main story rendering the text unreadable. Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter is paced to represent talking heads in a documentary. Jose Saramago’s refusal to use paragraphs (and occasionally punctuation) creates an oddly intense reading experience. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (thanks, Michael) not only layers narratives within one another but then completely mucks around with the format creating upside down or sharply angled lines, holes within the page revealing non-existent pages behind, flipping from transcribed dialogue to a story within footnotes. Utterly bonkers stuff.

So, the question isn’t “am I allowed to do it?” but “is it doing what it’s supposed to and is it doing it well?”

Which was the question Justin was really asking.

Hmm…

I’m not sure just yet. It’s a dangerous one. Style for style’s sake is not a good thing. There needs to be a reason, a point. It needs something solid backing it up. I feel brave, confident, as though I can carry off taking some risks, but then again: sometimes the classic look really is the best. Lines on a page, broken into regular paragraphs.

‘Oh my God! Dave!’ exclaimed Tim as we headed out into the chilly Sheffield January evening a lifetime ago. Our eyes sparkled and our cheeks were already slightly flushed from the pints of gin and tonic or whatever our pre-night out tipple had been at that point. ‘Are we wearing the same jacket?’

I looked at myself and then I looked at Tim. We were indeed wearing identical crisply shining new leather jackets. ‘Huh, how about that,’ I said. ‘Guess we’re the leather brothers.’

‘That’s what they’ll call us!’ Tim squealed, because back then even under-twenty-one Geordies talked vaguely like characters from Friends.

Having finished our cups of tea, we stood up from the benches down by the water inside the core of the Barbican. A chill seemed to be creeping in and so I scrambled into my jacket.

‘Hey,’ she said with a smile, ‘I like your jacket. It’s got red buttons. What? What’s so funny?’