For me this is the only shirt that matters. I won’t call it the shirt of the season, as the very concept of weather is now cryptic and any day now Putin or Xi Jinping will probably drop a dustbin of nukes on Leicester Square  — seasons as we know them may fucked. I’ll simply say that in my opinion this is the best shirt for this minute and leave it at that.

Obviously it’s by Comme des Garçons SHIRT. Those fragmented business stripes and wool slices glimpsed through a Sex Pistol snarl, it could hardly be anyone else. But while it’s a familiar signature, one that informs a handful of pieces in the collection, this time around it feels a like there’s something else at play. The functionless zips, the illogical pocket placements; is this a piss take of ubiquitous utilitarian menswear?

I don’t like my menswear funny. But as someone who has grown a little weary of faux-practical multi-pocketed gilets and coats, not to mention the excessively layered results, I can get on board with this (presumed) parody. Or at least I would if Comme des Garçons SHIRT weren’t asking 553 of our new sovereign’s sovereigns. It goes without saying, it is not a transaction I’m prepared to entertain.

I am more than aware how ridiculous it is, contemptible even, to be discussing such an obscene purchase while over at the Truss/Kwarteng key party they’re so enthusiastically double-ending people’s livelihoods. I’m ashamed to write this. You should be ashamed for reading it. I don’t know what to say, other than, capitalistic greed’s Hellraiser hooks are gouging me again and it’s such exquisite agony. The egomaniacal clothesman wants what he wants.

As you can see, there are a few shirts in the collection exploring the same design territory (see Dover Street and Farfetch) and I’d wear any of them. Each an audacious celebration of form over function and each requiring only spartan sartorial support to realise a full look. Frame one with a plain navy jacket and trousers and button it to the top to maximise your art-house credentials. Now you’re a conundrum, an enigma. You’re Michel Gondry. You’re Pedro Almodóvar. You’re the kind of guy who can buy a Basquiat pencil case from the Tate Modern gift shop, but like, ironically.

I can’t help feeling these shirts are gateway to the life I should be living. For some reason if I doodle an anthropomorphic dog in a baseball cap and upload 1000 slightly different versions of it to an NFT marketplace no one wants to buy one for 25k. I notice when I go to a cafe there isn’t a queue of people asking me to biro a pithy line on their napkin. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m pretty sure if I owned one of these shirts things would be very different.