The dressed and styled human body is irresistible to analyse. Framed by the idea that people’s dress and engagement with Fashion is a fundamental component of how we all conceive, create and convey personal and shared histories, the following ‘mini-essays’ are my attempt to unpick the cultural threads that hold our wardrobes together. Aide-mémoires, tongue-in-cheek, discursive, works-in-progress, I began writing them in 2013 in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyper Reality, although rarely with the same perspicacity, precision and pace.
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21. The Shoe
In 1956, Elvis Presley set the relationship parameters for his ‘Honey’. She could drink his liquor, steal his car and slander his name, but she would overstep the mark if she ever stood on his blue suede shoes. David Bowie was more concerned to have fun when he exhorted his fictional femme fatale to put…
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20. The Scent
‘I like your perfume. I can tell when you’ve been in. It always smells clean and fresh afterwards.’ Taken at face value, this is a reasonably nice complement. If I were to add that it was paid to me by a man – a burly, white-haired security guard, to be precise – whose uniform, worn…
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19. The Prepster
Consider the following questions: Do you dress in a manner which attracts women – to other men? If you had your life to live over again, would you still fall in love with yourself? Are you currently employed as a professional inheritor? If Moses had seen the way you dress, would there be another commandment?…
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17. The Suit
At first I was incredulous. Now I am inconsolable. News is spreading that the suit, a staple of menswear for over two hundred years, is being ‘broken up’. In the March edition of British GQ, Trevor Dolby argues that ‘The day of the jacket is over’.[i] As if there had been some kind of columnists’…
Dr Benjamin Wild 