Just recently I made what for me was quite a strong fashion statement. I went into Tesco and bought myself a new pair of jeans.
Sale time, obviously.
Now, although I don’t buy new clothes very often, I’m no tyro at this fashion game. So I carefully ignored the rack headed ‘New Season’s Colour.’ Partly because it displayed no price – and I’m no idiot – and partly because the New Season’s Colour was exactly the same shade of blue as the very first jeans I bought in those dim distant times when they were strictly factory and building site wear.
Seeking my style
Instead I patrolled the racks, ignoring the straight cut the skinny cut, the wide cut, the taper leg, the shrink fit, the taper bottom. Seeking instead the style I knew best suited my figure.
The style that allows me to sit down in my armchair without causing collateral damage to those parts that have served me well in the past. And soon enough I found them.
Regrettably in a dreadfully out of date shade of blue, but substantially reduced in price. So that was alright.
Until I read, only a week or so later, that the New Season’s Colour was not Original Working Man’s Blue after all, nor any other sort of blue, but various violent versions of pink and mushroom and red.
As is my wont, however, I resolved to go my own shabby way, ignoring what the fashionista dictate. Just as I ignored (flinched away from really), the news that the latest footwear for the young man about town is high heels.
Not built-up heels as worn by the unfortunate short of leg, but real honest to God, flagrantly flaunted high heels a la the ladies. Quel horreur!
Manbags at dawn
Yet I have to confess something almost as horrible. I own, have used extensively in the past and still on occasion use to this day, a man’s handbag.
Hold on though, before you gather up the children and run to find the nearest bobby, let me explain.
I spied the handbag in a shop window at a time when the style pages were filled with pictures of so-called men prancing about with various designs of these atrocities agin nature, dangling from their limp wrists.
What attracted me was that in addition to the wrist loop it boasted a slot at the back for fitting it onto a belt. Just the thing for a bloke who spent much of his time clad in tight, zip-pocket leather jackets sitting on a motorbike and sliding along continental motorways hour after rapid hour.
It’s handy, honest
From then on I sported the bag on my hip, holding all the stuff two-wheel tourists need-often in a hurry. Change for the toll booths, tickets for same at the other end, petrol money, credit card, passport, glasses, spare sun glasses, lipstick and powder (Sorry, not true that last bit).
Plus of course that precious form that proved you were paid-up NHS and therefore entitled to reasonable repair treatment anywhere in the EU.
So the handbag was not a fashion accessory after all, but instead a sort of extended money belt. Which I use even now when the weather dictates T-shirt and no jacket.
Perfectly logical therefore. Perfectly justified. And I repeat, not a handbag. Not at all. Nothing like one.
All the same, I like to make sure my shirt covers it when I’m out.
Image: xJason Rogersx under CC BY 2.0
