Hold up. Don’t go anywhere. I know what you’re thinking. Thin soles. T-bar strap. Looks like something your niece would wear to primary school. But let’s just give these slender numbers a moment.
Is it possible there’s something here for the more open-minded menswearman?
Ever Frogtaped the edges of a wall, painted, peeled the tape off and had to go over the many irregularities with a tiny artist’s brush while balancing on a stepladder? What about putting up a solid wood floating shelf when you can’t find the studs in the wall? I began a week off with such DIY ambitions, only to feel them slowly collapse as my incompetence became clear. Last night, faced with four cupboard doors I couldn’t line up I admitted defeat. My girl called a bloke on TaskRabbit while I hid under the covers.
Four days of electric drills and rock hard paint brushes has done for me. My back aches, my neck’s sore. As I doze in the morning I see the contents of my Bosch 33 Piece Drill Bit Set marching Fantasia-style. I dream I’m on Shutter Island: but rather than investigating a missing person, I’m just trying to screw on miles and miles of shutters.
My limitations are clear. I’m fundamentally incompatible with spirit-levels. I’m a thinker not a doer. I’ve decided I function best when left alone with a Scandinavian crime drama and an M&S Victoria sponge. Nice and comfy. Probably in a cardigan like this.
The current headline show at The Design Museum in London is Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers. And as electronic music neither begins with Kraftwerk nor ends with The Chemical Brothers, I wasn’t surprised to find the scope of the experience a little restricted. Impossible perhaps to comprehensively nail the most influential musical form of the last 50 years in an hour’s museum tour.
Still, there is much to love: Laurent Garnier’s ferocious soundtrack — a seamless interlocking of the familiar and the obscure and the experimental graphics used across years of labels, releases and posters — all attempting to visualise a mood, a sound, an energy. Seeing the original Chicago fliers for nights boasting Ron Hardy, DJ Pierre, Adonis and Phuture is worth the price of admission alone.
Rounding things off The Chemical Brothers, and a room blitzed with more strobes than the human eye can process. Impressive stuff.
There wasn’t much clothing though. No focus on the dungarees and pastel Kickers of the acid days, no reference to the leather-trousered John Richmond and Nick Coleman fan-boys as house embraced glam.
I remember the Blackburn raves, all the girls wore tops like this one. Clothing designed for jumping about. Practical and androgynous. A signal to every opportunistic herbert like me that they were there to dance not romance.
I dislike generalisations. Yet I make them all the time. “Of course, it’s wrong to generalise…”, I say, before doing just that. Does inserting such a caveat insulate the speaker from idiocy, or simply magnify it?
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve railed against the spray-on jean bro (the ripped knees, the driving shoes, the socklessness). Lumping them all together as an easy target for derision – shorthand for herd mentality, cheapness and unsophistication. I really am a terrible person. In my head I’ve blindly ascribed my other pet hates (misogyny, hypocrisy, public spitting, eating on the Tube…) to anyone with even the faintest whiff of Boohoo.
Of course I’m too lazy to finesse my argument with any scholarly learning. Far easier to assume anyone in a muscle-fit knit is a bell. If a guy was to hock up a cocktail of phlegm and nasal mucus and gob it on the pavement, would he be more likely to be wearing a low-cut v-neck tee, or a Sasquatchfabrix Haori shirt?
Autumn then. After a brief spell of luminous optimism — during the weirdest summer in living memory — it’s time to face facts. It’s getting chilly. What will that mean for viral infections already on the rise? And what about the tanking economy — didn’t someone mention catastrophic job losses just in time for Christmas? Trump seems to be balancing the books too — his tacit approval of humanity’s dark side is again stirring the angry and empty-headed. And Johnson’s keeping his head down. Is it better to have no leader or one who can’t tell the truth?
Scary times. Hole up, sit tight, ride it out. Stock up on tinned goods and buy a baseball bat. If you’ve got any hatches, now’s the time to batten them down.
Unfortunately your joyful floral shirts and printed shorts are now useless — fold them into plastic tubs and bury them in the garden. The end times are coming. You’ll need ready access to baked beans, toast, blankets and fresh water. And maybe a blazer like this. I mean, if doomsday lands on a Friday or Saturday night, you’re still going to want to look good.
The other day I read a piece about Congolese sapeurs on The Guardian. I’ve read about them a number of times over the years. But it reminded me that for these remarkable dandies, Pierre Cardin remains a label of desirability and prestige. So I visited the Pierre Cardin page — a sad digital window into a once vital brand. I looked at the current Pierre Cardin offerings over at House of Frazer and discovered you can get two branded Pierre Cardin sweaters in 100% acrylic for £20. I remembered that my first ‘designer’ fragrance was a prized and vaguely phallic bottle of Pierre Cardin, bought in the early 80s from Boots. I couldn’t afford Armani. I can still recall the smell.
It made me think about the collapse of credibility and cultural worth. Either through over expansion and dilution of the brand (as was the case with Cardin) or through the loss of an eponymous designer — Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Jil Sander.
I considered how all these thoughts stemmed from seeing some beautiful pictures of African sartorialists. And how the mind is this remarkable muddle of half-remembered facts, sensations and emotions, lying dormant. Just waiting to be threaded together, to be patchworked into a whole.
