The certainties of youth are slipping away and I find myself in something of clothing identity crisis. It doesn’t help that what’s ‘cool’ is increasingly hard to pin down. So where does that leave an average bloke just hoping for the best?
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n September I will turn 44, the supposed first iceberg of ageing. As my own personal A23a approaches, I find myself, when it comes to how to get dressed at least, not older and wiser but but more adrift than ever.
It’s not necessarily for want of effort. A while ago I tried on a pair of wide trousers: the big blocky sort that have become increasingly fashionable. I hadn’t worn anything like them before and wasn’t convinced, but was feeling bored with my own wardrobe. When I modelled them in the shop for my wife, she reacted instantly. I couldn’t pull them off, she said. You’re not an art or fashion person, was the implication. She was right; her advice tends to be sound.
As a man, when you push into your 40s it becomes harder to keep up with every new trend and perhaps there comes a point at which maybe you shouldn’t. But you might not want to totally give up either. You don’t want to seem like the old guy finally catching up with a new trend just as the last helicopter pulls out of Saigon. Equally it can be mortifying attempting to grab on to every incoming style. And so like Clinton or Blair, you scramble desperately for a sartorial third way. Or something that sits with relative comfort as the waistline expands – the middle ground. It always comes with a nagging fear that it doesn’t look quite right.
