Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 6

Time was, you dressed like what you was. If you were a baby, you favoured some swaddling. Toddlers seemed keen to dress as miniature fops. Infants wore uniform until they left school. And then you were a man and you dressed as a man. This lasted you for bloody ages until you went to the clothes shop and said, through clacking false teeth and wispy nicotine-stained moustache, ‘I am now an old man. Can I have my old man clothes, please?’ And they would kit you out in flat cap, weskit, pipe and tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

No more, alas, no more. These days you can dress up as what you like, when you like, until you drop dead. And what this means in practice is that everyone dresses young. See the octogenarian pop star in his baseball boots and Camden Market T-shirt! Observe the ageing accountant in his chinos and distressed jacket! Look at the Chelsea Pensioner dressed (because he’s a bit behind with the fashions) like a member of All Saints, freshly back from a rave in the Gulf.

Nobody has seen fit to reverse this notion. Apart from the odd prawn who likes to dress up as a fogey just to make sure that they never have sex again, young people do not for the most part want to look like old people. Yet now they do, because the old people are all dressed as them. It’s a paradox! How will we be able to tell the young people from the old people? Oh yeah, that’s right. The old people will be the ones with the wrinkly skin and the back problems. And they’ll also be the ones who can afford the trendy designer clothes, ha ha.