WHEN IT COMES to the colour green, I’m with Kermit. It’s really not an easy shade to pull off in an outfit, thanks to its undertones of school uniforms, elves and a certain Glasgow football team. Last year’s fashion for all things of a grassy hue had me scuttling back to the black in my wardrobe in no time. Annoyingly, it’s returned to the catwalks for another season, and I’m beginning to face up to the fact that if I’m going to be even remotely fashionable this summer, I’m going to have to embrace the evergreen.
Men, I have noticed, don’t have this problem. For them, green’s a pretty standard colour, happily worn among an assortment of garments including shirts, ties and jackets. Maybe it’s a tweed thing, I don’t know, but most of them don’t seem to have an issue with it. In fact, when it comes to fashion in general, men seem to be acclimatising more and more these days. One of my male friends, normally prone to suits and ties of a pleasant – if standard – nature, turned up recently wearing a jumper in a shade that can only be described as pea green. It suited him, and it was a little daring, and I’ve been campaigning ever since for him to wear it more often.
Generally, adventurous fashion on a man is to be applauded. Even pink is acceptable now, as the shots of Scottish actor Gerard Butler at Wednesday night’s Dressed To Kilt fashion show in New York proved. Yet I have puzzled, really I have, over this year’s GQ Best-Dressed Men List.
It’s a veritable mishmash of footballers, has-been rock stars and men who wear frocks. I could have compiled a better-dressed list from my primary school class photo.
Most confusing is the entrance of footballer Rio Ferdinand at number one (last year he was number 46). According to Dylan Jones, GQ’s editor, Ferdinand is “a clotheshorse in the best sense of the word”, which seems to defeat the object entirely. A clotheshorse, to me at least, is someone who lets the clothes wear them, rather than the other way around. And a man who changes his hairstyle as often as a Premiership star changes his girlfriend should never be trusted.
But Ferdinand’s inclusion is only the tip of a dodgily dressed iceberg. Jose Mourinho, a man whom, I must confess, I would be hard pushed to recognise if he stood up in my Covent Garden carrot and coriander, climbs in at number two. Google informs me that the Chelsea manager is a “self-appointed deity”, a breed not normally known for their expert fashion sense. He has recently teamed up with suit label Hugo Boss, the less said about which the better.
Further down the list are some fully fledged horrors. That curious creature John McCririck makes it to an even more curious number 13 (although, hearteningly, he is at number five on the worst-dressed list), while the obnoxious Pete Doherty, ex-Libertines singer, on-off boyfriend of Kate Moss and very public heroin addict, is at number nine. Because swaggering about on stage while out of your head and wearing a trilby with a joint tucked into the brim is just soooo fashionable. Yeah, right.
All a list like this will do is force nervous fashion novices back underground, intimidated by the weird, the wonderful and the downright dreadful. For, where once a single pea green jumper might have blossomed into a wardrobe of rainbow colours, it is now likely to vanish, stashed at the back of a cupboard never to be seen again. So, gentlemen, I implore you: ignore that list. Keep doing what you’re doing. Honestly. It suits you.