We go shopping for shorts and trousers at Selfridges, after Harrods the largest department store in London. This is an experience that persuades you (if you needed persuading) of your total irrelevance to the marketers of the modern world.
The menswear floor is like a huge barn, a wasteland of jeans and and T-shirts in the worst of possible taste, every concession carrying a minor variant to the same thing. It turns out that this is all for the tourist, young fashion at its most impossible. The sizes are made for 16 year old, slim flesh-less legs. The waists are for anchorites from some Coptic monastery, where there is little food. The colours are bright and garish, and the prices keenly exorbitant. 135 pounds for jeans? There is nothing here for the young middle-aged (o.k, that’s artistic license).
“Do you have size 36?” ” Sorry, no, Sir. Size 36 is enormous. You can’t possibly need size 36!” “I am not talking meters, I am referring to inches.” “No we don’t go that large”.
Living as I do in a land where a 36 inch waist is becoming a rarity and size 45 is the norm, I am speechless. Which teenagers from which country are they aiming at?
“Does it occur to you that there is a huge market out there for the older man? We are growing in number, us older men. We want to buy things occasionally, like cotton trousers and shorts. And here you are, all you concessionaires, all selling thick denim in slight variants of blue and black but mostly identical, all to the same people. If I were young again…………………..”. No wonder older men are looking increasingly dowdy – there is nothing to buy. Soon you will see otherwise prosperous old gents with clothes bought thirty years ago and now in tatters. It’s hard to replace them.
It is hot and sunny in London . I wanted shorts for the enjoyment of my Epicurean garden. Sigh…… I will have to enjoy it in my tuxedo, the only clothing I have that does justice to the beauty of Nature.
Dear charming-though-doomed-to-dowdy mature man,
Your public awaits a photo taken in your Epicurean Roof Garden– of you in your tuxedo.
Women of a certain fending-off-dowdy age try to avoid venturing into such shopping purgatories for many reasons, chief among which is the ear-shattering ugliness of the music piped through the stores.
Oh how I agree with Carmen re. The public music of today which must be rendering this generation of young people deaf before they are 40. Plus it’s tuneless, and screechy .
I am also at the fending off dowdy age, but unlike the moderator of this blog I have to take in the waist bands because the average sized waist for women is now several inches bigger than mine. Plus I have a feeling that shorts are out this year for the mature man … Or at least they should be!
You would look very dashing in a sarong. Appropriate for the Epicurian, with its Greek overtones.
Who said I had to let my belt out? I ‘ll have you know, Ms. Forsyth, that I have been called a sylph. A large sylph, but a sylph. At 18, MY waist measured 34 inches; at MY current age 36 inches. This compares with the average elderly American at 130 inches, I am guessing. Has anyone any statistics?.
I understood a Sylph was a ‘slender, graceful woman or girl’ (confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary and they should know.
Therefore I would have thought you would be a little more insulted by being called a sylph than the aspersion made by Ms.Forsyth.???
Perhaps not. Therefore the said Ms. Forsyth is correct… I too think you would look very fetching in a sarong.
Wikipedia says sylphs are “invisible beings of the air”. Spirits or ghosts, perhaps
So thin you can’t see them. Write silly things onblogs, unseen. No mention of gender. I have no objection to a sarong. Wot s’wrong with a sarong?