Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 12

What on earth has happened in the world of fashion? If it’s not girls who are roughly the shape of salt cellars walking down aisles in Tokyo, Madrid or Milan wearing a combination of a traffic bollard, a coat hanger and a chocolate croissant – with the likelihood of it ever reaching the stores about the same as me becoming Chief Rabbi – then there’s the image of grossly overweight men wandering around in the sort of kit that only an athlete in his prime (such as David Beckham, or indeed my good self) should be seen.

Let’s return to the days of the fifties, where the woman of the house was in an attractive floral skirt cut just below the knee, waiting for the man of the house to return after a hard day’s endeavour – she would greet him with a whisky and soda and a nice warm meal. She wore an apron and sensible shoes and delighted in talking about how well behaved the children had been, and how she was going to be making jam, and the next Women’s Institute monthly meeting. Those were the days that made Britain great.

Children wore dark-coloured gabardine raincoats with their gloves on bits of string through the sleeves and woollen balaclavas; boys, even from the age of seven, had to wear neckties. Little girls wore pinafore dresses and would no sooner put a safety pin through their nose or navel than attempt to go deep-sea diving with a great white shark. Dad wore a sensible suit with a white shirt, a tie and a hat, and Britain was a safe place to be. When was the last time you tuned into Crimewatch and the attacker was described as wearing a Prince of Wales check suit, a white shirt, a Guards’ tie, a sensible pair of black shoes and was carrying a rolled-up umbrella and a briefcase? This is my secret plan to combat street crime – if we all dress like this, we will all be good guys.

How on earth would our predecessors view fashion today – particularly men’s fashion? How is it that the most obscenely unfit men seem to be the ones who clamour to go to sports shops and fill their baskets with utterly inappropriate clothing? In my new world order, only men who have competed in professional football up to and including Champions League level should be allowed to wear trousers that are cut off just below the knee. Obviously youngsters will be exempt from this ban, but my prime target will be those hideous, beer-bellied oafs living in Essex and driving Ford Mondeos who inexplicably seem to be under the misapprehension that they look attractive dressed in a West Ham shirt that is straining across their ample belly, sporting a tattoo stating ‘I Love Mum’ and wearing a diving watch that will be able to take them to a depth of sixty fathoms. How they think they will ever get any use out of that while watching West Ham and Ipswich battle out a 0–0 draw defies belief.

The other fashion crime for men are combat pants. Why is it that blokes seem to think they need to fit as many pockets and zips as they possibly can on their trousers or their jackets. Does it actually ensure that they don’t lose anything? I don’t think so! They are just as capable or losing their car keys, wallet or mobile phone in this gear as they are in anything else. Again, if you are a slim-hipped youth of eighteen currently having trials with Tottenham Hotspur and have the toning and finesse of an Olympic diver, you can wear just about anything you like; unfortunately this sort of revealing, figure-hugging gear is generally favoured by blokes who are a cross between Luciano Pavarotti and Buddha.

The other male fashion crime is the baseball cap: quite why a man in his mid- to late fifties thinks it’s fashionable to be wearing a cap with the Nike logo emblazoned across it or a slogan such as ‘Go For It’ is baffling. Decorum, taste and decency has deserted men’s fashion. Can you honestly imagine Winston Churchill making his all-important ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech while wearing a Ben Sherman short-sleeved shirt, a checked cap and blue Dr Marten boots? I think not.

Other fashion victims include the men who think they have to have a logo on absolutely every piece of their attire. If it has an emblem of a crocodile, a polo pony or a laurel wreath, this kind of bloke is happy to wear it. If I had the time and the ability, I would love to try to promote a logo of a piece of goat dung as the hot new accessory – it would give me huge enjoyment to see men standing outside pubs in city centres up and down the land and going on holiday absolutely determined to be wearing the latest polo shirt with the emblem of a pile of steaming goat turd in the full belief that it was the height of fashion.

This is one area where, tragically, the fairer sex seems to be no brighter. They’re more than happy to cram anything from their feet to their bosoms into increasingly uncomfortable apparatus or designs just to get the look of that particular season. I would pay good money to see anyone actually copy any of the designs from the top names that come to London Fashion week or the Paris catwalk and wear that style to the their local Tesco or Asda. Imagine queuing at the Sainsbury’s refund desk in the latest Vivienne Westwood or Alexander McQueen creation, complete with bondage chains, PVC and fetish gear, and then ask for a refund on a two-litre carton of milk that’s gone off before its sell-by date! Or bending over the fish counter in a pair of high-heeled shoes that defy gravity and seem to be on the point of breaking your ankle and leaving you face down in a fat piece of haddock at any second if you lose concentration!

And then there’s children’s fashion. What do you suppose goes through the mind of a parent of a young daughter who buys her little girl a T-shirt with the slogan ‘So many boys, so little time!’ on it? This was an actual product from a leading clothing manufacturer that had been on sale for months and was only taken off after listeners to my radio show made me aware of their grave disquiet about this item, particularly as the story raised its ugly head at a time when a huge number of paedophile stories were circulating. A caller told me that she had complained to the store that the logo about too many boys was utterly inappropriate. I have to say that after we gave out the managing director’s private phone line out and urged listeners to ring, they were very quick to remove that item. But the question remains: who on earth thought that kind of T-shirt was suitable for girls aged three to eleven? And why is it that parents today want their children to grow up so quickly? What’s wrong with the great Ladybird range of clothing and sensible sandals. Children need to be children for a certain amount of time. They should not become fashion slaves or image-conscious label groupies when they have just about come off their mother’s breast. Let them have their childhood with little shorts, little dresses and simple T-shirts, and just bring back basic designs.

My fashion world might be a reactionary one, and one that can be seen to be desperately simplistic, but when it comes to children’s fashion I assure you it would be a made-to-measure success.