FASHION MUM
My mum still insists on buying me jeans as tight as leggings. I’ve spent the last five years trying to explain to her why I like a bit more room in my pants. I need a bit of room to swing my legs—all three of them—but sadly, my mum is of the opinion that I really do not know what I’m taking about.
“You have zero sense of fashion!” she duly informs me with a frown, adding, “Besides, isn’t the whole idea to tuck “it” in instead of having “it” swing about?” I tell my mum she is mistaking my jeans for a bra. It is neither the same thing or governed by the same principle. She does not understand, or if she does she pretends not to. Ignoring my cries of protest she goes on to buy those jeans for me, and so every year I get a new pair of legging jeans for my birthday.
Lately, I have come to suspect that perhaps I am the only male in this country who wears jeans of this kind. This suggests to me that perhaps there is a company somewhere in China whose sole earnings are dependent on how many of these—dare I still call them—jeans they manage to sell. In their record room, they have charts where the sales for the year are arranged per country. 190 white legging jeans for people in France. 3000 for the gay community in Italy. 3 for some guy in America named George Bush. And finally, 18 for a certain Nigerian called Carlang. If I wasn’t so worried I would have been delighted. My name actually is on a chart!
Now, I’m not saying all this is a fact. I might be wrong. And yet the suggestion that my acceptance of these yearly gifts from my mum brings revenue to some poor family in China gives me a bit of self importance as I wear them. I wear them not for myself, but for the Chinese family that makes them.
Where am I going with all this?
Nowhere really. I’ve started with every woman being a fashion expert and ended up in China...We will once again begin.
Every woman is a self proclaimed fashion expert. They all claim to know what one should wear and what one shouldn’t. From the French with their bizarre outfits to the Italians with their silk shirts and trousers, from the three-piece outfits of Savile Row to the flared trousers and oversized shirts of the African American in Harlem. There’s the Chinese with their simple one-piece outfits and the Indians with their colourful sweeping gowns.
The lure of talking fashion is restricted to half of the human demographic. Fashion is an interesting topic only when it is applied to the other sex. For men, the rules governing fashion are blessedly simple. Do not wear bright coloured clothes, avoid clingy trousers and for the sake of all that’s holy, do not wear fur. (People who break these rules are simply called pimps.) It’s a theory that has never failed. It certainly has never let me down. People (and by people I mean females) sometimes ask why I always appear to be dressed in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers when I’m not dressed for some official function. I laugh at them and refuse to confess the obvious.
It is very hard to be badly dressed if you wear a nice t-shirt and a nice pair of sneakers. After years of trial and error, man finally settled on the perfect form of dressing. The jeans and shirt. Pharrel Williams dresses like this. The Prince of England dresses like this. George Clooney dresses like this. Those seem very easy odds to bet on . . . not for women.
I marvel every time I walk into my sister’s room. It seems she always has something new to try on. A stunning myriad of conflicting attires. Blouses. Tops with one strap. Tops with spaghetti straps. Tops with one spaghetti strap. Tops with no straps at all. The list of options for just a simple top is endless. Women, it seems, are obsessed about how they look. I do not understand most of it. If you ask me, a woman in blue jeans, looks the same in black jeans . . . not so to them.
Women are critical about how they look. They invent rules that boggle male folk. Whilst it is normal (and indeed expected) for a man to maintain the same pair of jean trousers over a week, a woman simply cannot. I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve heard that if a woman were to wear the same pair of jeans twice in a week the world as we know it would come to an end.
Women are insane about clothes. They dive into magazines and gasp over the outfits that supposedly are different. They tut-tut over sashes and swoon over bows. They marvel at the design behind the skirt. The A-skirt, the pencil skirt, the straight skirt, the slit skirt . . . it is an incredible phenomenon to behold.
But the madness of female wear is not wholly constrained to the feminine folk. At some point in time males made an entry. Whilst men are normally indifferent when it comes to the selection of female clothing, there is one area where they make an exception.
Men are always interested in female lingerie.
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