Reasons To Feel Sorry for Men, Part I

From your readings of the Skirt column, you may judge me to be a heartless feminist, blind to the plight of the modern man. This is not so.

Boys, I feel your pain. Whether I care that much is a different matter, but recently, I have come to realise one of the great struggles for the 21st century male: shopping.

Not being dragged around Top Shop by your girlfriend, but shopping for yourself. Very few men can dress themselves well without looking like a tosser or a cliché.

I only know of about five men who dress well, and even they can be inconsistent.

Two of them hit South Molton Street and spend triple figures on accessorising. One of them works very little and spends his time perusing Stables Market for one-off vintage finds. And boys take note that none of my stylish buddies own a pair of cowboy boots.

All of them have a clothes budget to rival the gross domestic product of a small country, but money doesnt necessarily buy you style.

Especially when Marc Jacobs and his ilk will charge you a weeks wages for a pair of hideously pointy-toed shoes, which look alarmingly like malformed flippers. As these monstrosities protrude from your ill-fitting, incorrectly-lengthed trousers, do you know how much of a dickhead you look?

One poor trilby-hatted fool I know wears almost exclusively Diesel, but still manages to look like a twatter encased in £120 worth of denim. Its like no one has told you about cut, colour and indeed style; how tapered legs make your arse look huge, how to buy trousers with the correct inside leg measurement, how stonewash went out with thumbholes in your hoodies.

And even those who are frugal with their clothing expenditure still make mammoth errors of judgement. James Gill, editor of Click Music, wears jeans so old the crotch has worn away into nothingness. If I were more uptight, or if Click Music had any money, I would have sued to indecent exposure a long time ago.

This perchant for groinal exposure started young with Gill. When he was a teenager, Gill tried to emulate his poodle-rock heroes by cutting a star-shaped hole out of the crotch of his jeans and replacing it with a leatherette patch fasted to his jeans with split pins designed to hold paper, as you can imagine, it didnt hold him very well at all.

Will you boys ever learn? I doubt it, but the lucky ones will get girlfriends who can do their shopping for them. The ones that dress like tossers, most likely are, and the rest of you will just have to make do with Burtons. My heart goes out to you, I am truly sorry.


Originally plblished circa 2004 as part of the Skirt columns on ClickMusic.com