Some things never change – or should they?

There’s a new survey out that apparently concluded that nobody above a certain age – the beginning of one’s sixth decade – should ever wear a pair of jeans.

See here for a piece on this in – THE GUARDIAN

Confession time. I’m writing today as someone who lives by the Bob Dylan lyric “(I’ll) eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry …” [from the song Standing In The Doorway featured on his late masterpiece album 1997’s Time Out Of Mind] and therefore have never much cared about my appearance.

The person I most resembled as a kid was a fictional one – William from the Rachel Crompton Just William books in their original form – and, being a street urchin-type who regularly picked up enough minus marks on my own to prevent my ‘section’ ever winning the termly contest for outstanding collective behaviour – the height of my notoriety at my prep school was the occasion at an end of year mass school assembly when the headmaster singled me out for a mention for (once again) permanently looking as if I had just been pulled through a hedge backwards.

My point is that, just as I ‘eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry’, I’ve always tended to approach clothes-wearing from the utilitarian viewpoint that generally when I get up in the morning I grab the first item that comes to hand, put in on, and then go off to face whatever the new day will bring my way. [In my own defence here, I would add the proviso that if what I’ve just grabbed is sufficiently whiffy or grubby, then even I would tend to switch to the next clean equivalent in my wardrobe. That said, whether or not it was colour-coordinated with the remainder of my attire would, of course, remain of minor significance].

In consequence of the above, for most of my life, my adherence to the fashion of the moment – or indeed any fashion fad at all – has for the most part been random and above all incidental.

Even when wearing denim jeans, which has been a pretty constant habit throughout my life. I should estimate that it was only in the late 1980s that I finally gave up wearing my then favourite pair, sporting flares about the size of open umbrellas at the bottom of the legs … and this only because they fell apart.

Okay, I’m not a complete klutz. In some sort of a way, whenever I see smart-looking trousers in magazine advertisements or even on guys I meet or see in the street, I do feel a slight pang of envy at the knowledge that – even if I was to go out and buy similar – I’d still look a scruff and never how other people do. I guess that’s the reason that you might say I’ve made a little virtue out of a necessity: since I look like an idiot whatever I put on, it doesn’t matter what I wear.

They teach us that when going for a job, first impressions count – or is it that decisions upon hiring people (or not) often get made in the first fifteen seconds of an interview? It’s one of the two.

I can see the logic in that. If someone doesn’t seem to care about their appearance, or indeed themselves generally, how could they ever go out and represent our organisation in a favourable light?

That is why today I’m a bit torn on this proposition that one should not wear jeans beyond a certain age.

Part of me gets where it’s coming from – inappropriateness comes into it and here the expression ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’ comes to mind.

I can see how modern youth, who often seem to have a default uniform of T-shirt and jeans, might regard the vision of senior citizens of either gender walking about the place in similar as somehow weird and ‘wrong’.

However, another side of me thinks “What the hell? I’ve been wearing jeans (and a lot of other stuff) for fifty years and more whenever I’ve felt like it, so why should I stop now?”

When you think about it, the old adage “Whatever you do is wrong” just about sums it up, as it does so much in Life.