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Oddly enough, women tend to spend a lot more on clothes than men, but paradoxically, they actually have more ways to change the appearance of their clothing than men do, so strictly speaking, they should need to buy less items!
For summer clothing, women can change the appearance of a T-shirt or polo-shirt by using a scarf, either round the neck as a contrasting colour, or twisted to make a casual belt around the waist, or tied in the hair as a floaty pony tail accessory that harmonises with the colour of your top. Women can can also wear waistcoats over T-shirts, especially long sleeve T-shirts, to ring the changes on their wardrobes.
Both men and women can wear a summer vest T-shirt over a long sleeve T-shirt, or use a contrasting vest under a hoodie to make a colour contrast that can make a familiar piece of clothing look totally different.
Men may like to try wearing more formal clothing with shorts, and less formal with trousers: often they tend to stick to vests with shorts, lightweight polo-shirts with trousers but swapping those over you can develop a whole new look with the same clothes.
Apparently, men are more body conscious than they were a decade ago. The evidence is in the mannequin: Homme Nouveau have a shop window dummy that’s just 33 inches round the chest, and Burberry’s new window man is similarly spindly. All this in a time when the average Brit man has a 39 inch waist – yes, waist, not chest!
So how do you manage to look like the slender chaps whom fashion is designed for? It’s the same problem that has beset women for decades: clothes are not designed for average sizes and are modelled by genetic rarities who are taller and slimmer than 90% of the population.
1. Skinny jeans work for almost all men, even the extremely chunky, but you need to make sure that if you are less than slim, you cover up the waist, which can look porky, with a loose fitting V necked T-shirt which slims the body even further
2. Hoodies with a zip rather than a front pocket are slimming and elongating – pick navy blue, grey or black if you’re not the slimmest chap, but go for red, white or beige if you are skinny and proud of it.
But if you are proud of being a big chap, don’t despair. It seems that a ‘robust’ body shape is more popular in times political uncertainty or economic stress – because culturally we are more likely to value men who look as if they can take care of themselves and of others too. Play up your beefy status with bright polo shirts and round necked T-shirts with stripes or ringer details to show off your bulky beauty.
For the first time in five years, what you wear might be influencing the way people think about you politically. Nick Clegg’s sudden popularity boost may be welcome to the Lib Dems, but, as ever, the political commentary has been at least partly about the colour of the tie each candidate was wearing.
Politicians complain about this frivolousness, but the colour of each political party is an important part of political identity.
• Red has been the colour of the Labour Party since its inception in 1900 because it reflects the radicals of the French Revolution.
• Traditionally, the Tory party used all three colours of the Union Jack: red, blue and white, but when Labour came along and annexed red, it settled for blue alone, which is the colour many Conservative groupings worldwide have also chosen.
• The Liberal Dems seem to be going for gold this time around, although in the past they’ve chosen the brighter shade of orange, both of which hark back Liberal Party from which the new Lib Dems have developed.
• And then there’s the party named after a colour – the Green Party which links its cause to the environment by choosing a colour as its title.
So if you are seen around the workplace in a red tie, people will subconsciously assume you’re a Labour supporter, while your smart blue work shirts suddenly carry an unexpected freight of Tory hinterland. The green spring-like T-shirt that you bought a few weeks ago is no longer ‘Shrek-like’ but suggests environmental associations and your Dad’s favourite shorts in canary yellow are likely to be viewed as his emergence as a nascent Cleggite. If you want to be politically neutral until after 6 May, stick to grey, black and white – grey trousers and a black shirt or jeans and a white hoodie will keep you free of party affiliations.
Don’t take the route followed by a crowd of around 2,000 in Brick Lane, London, this spring! Ten police officers were injured during scuffles between the crowd and the police at the American Apparel casual clothing ‘rummage’, during which three people were arrested. To get a bargain without a criminal record:
Explore the online offerings of your favourite shops – you’ll often find links saying ‘sale’ or ‘special offer‘ or ‘clearance’ all of which can reveal wonderful clothing at anything up to 75% reduced prices.
While you’re there, seek out any additional discounts on offer for online buyers – these will often be headed ‘promotional code’ or ‘discount code’ or ‘coupon’ and will appear at the checkout stage. If you spot such a box, open a new tab and conduct an internet search for the retailer’s name and the phrase used on the retailer’s site – you might get lucky and find a code that reduces the cost even further.
Double up and more by checking the relationship between order number, order cost and delivery cost. You may find that bulk order T-shirts cost only a few pennies more than one alone did, or that by increasing the size of your order until it reaches a few more pounds, you could get free postage – in other words, you might score an entire hoodie or pair of shorts for the same cost as you would have paid for postage.
Use seasonal searches. There are specific times of the year (September for summer wear, for example) that are ideal to seek out bargains. If you’re looking for a winter weight coat, then March or April are great times to be shopping online, while lightweight shirts are often marked down in the autumn and can be bought at bargain prices.
Everybody wears cotton clothing – babies are popped into it from birth because of its softness, its breathability and the way that it can take heavy laundering (therefore its absolute cleanliness can be guaranteed). Baby clothing is, quintessentially, cotton clothing.
Once we grow up we move into the kind of rugged cotton clothes that our mothers can wash and wash and wash – whether it’s sports gear for the budding footballer or gymnast, or short-sleeved T-shirts for the incipient artist or junior trainspotter. This cotton wear is wash-and-wear style, in bright colours and is often the kind of garment that a child will fall in love with and insist on wearing all the time. It’s a good thing it’s tough!
And as we become adults, we moving into our own fashion preferences: brilliant white shirts worn for interviews, brand new black T-shirts to impress the opposite sex at the weekend, comfy hoodies for weekend meet ups.
Caring for Cotton
While cotton is robust, you can do quite a lot to keep it looking better for longer. Deep colours benefit from being washed inside out – especially if they have transfer designs on them. Light colours take almost any amount of laundering, but be careful not to wash them with anything dark, or they are likely to pick up a tint of the darker colour.
Cotton or Poly-cotton?
The choice isn’t as simple as you might think. Pure cotton has advantages – it becomes more comfortable the more it’s worn, and you can iron it on a very high heat without destroying it. It holds its dye colour well too. On the down side, it does crease quite badly.
Poly-cotton doesn’t crease nearly so badly, but it does have a tendency to pill, which is where the fabric makes tiny bobbles over time. Also it can’t be washed on as high a temperature as 100% cotton can.
This is the time of year to sort out your clothes and get yourself organised so that you save time and space and always look good.
If you have a wardrobe with shelves, put your jumpers, sweatshirts, T-shirts and hoodies on the shelves, organised either by colour (all blue together, all grey together etc) or by purpose (casuals on one shelf, sportswear on another, smart tops on a third etc). Take any clothes that you haven’t worn for a year and try selling them or swapping them with friends – they do no good in your wardrobe if you’re not going to wear them!
Buy new clothes in colours that are guaranteed to work together – blue, grey, black and khaki are the colours most worn by men, while women can add red and green to the list. Pick a base colour and buy all your ‘key’ garments in that colour: a blue summer jacket tones with any shade of blue shirt and T-shirt, and can be worn with jeans or navy chinos.
Hang ties and scarves on the same hanger with the smart shirt or blouse that they coordinate with – this saves a lot of time in the morning, looking for the right accessory. Similarly, only buy black or grey socks and all the same kind, that way you never have to put them in pairs!
Apparently we’re all getting bigger – men’s shoe sizes have increased over the past three decades, so the average size, which used to be nine, is now 11 and the ‘average’ woman is now a size 12-14, whereas twenty years ago she was a 10-12. And it’s not just being fatter – we’re also an average of two inches taller than our parents and three inches taller than our grandparents.
So, how does the bigger person dress to look at their best – is it automatically necessary to wear tent-like clothing and clumsy shoes or can you look slim and stylish?
For men, the situation has improved a lot recently – the rise of sports clothing, or sport casual as it’s called in the USA, means that you can look fantastic without having to shop around too much.
There are a lot of old rules about dressing to look slim that no longer apply – for example, all the ‘larger size’ specialists used to tell men to buy shirts with vertical stripes because it was slimming – but nowadays, any fitted shirt that’s striped implies that you’re hiding your gut, so it’s better to buy an end-on-end weave or plain shirt with a good pleat in the back and let the tails hang out to conceal any tummy you might wish to conceal. Alternatively, buy a loose fit polo-shirt that fits perfectly on the shoulders and wear it with a pair of dark coloured tailored trousers. This fools the eye into believing the shirt is tailored too, and that you’re actually slim-fit!
Mens sweatshirts are often recommended to the larger guy, because they tend to be comfortable clothing that comes in XXXL sizing, but if you want to give the illusion of slimness, you’re better to invest in some pastel hoodies with a front zip, and wear them over a dark T-shirt. The V-shape that a half-zipped hoody makes, when worn over a darker undergarment, has a naturally slimming effect, especially when worn with dark trousers and black trainers which lead the eye to see you as narrowing from the shoulders to the feet.
Once again, lots of catwalks featured nautical style clothing – for women in particular this took the form of white trousers. When you’ve got your trousers, and they can be wide-leg, chino or skinny fit, team them with a striped T-shirt, Breton style, in navy and or black and white. For men, this look is turning up as striped long-sleeved tops combined with distressed jeans and boat shoes.
Also, for women, the safari look is still strong – Paul Smith had leopard print clothing worn with brown and black striped accessories and Marc Jacobs went for a more Native American theme, complete with face-paint like Adam Ant. To make this look work, it’s best to pick a colour and then combine prints and stripes in that shade, so tiger stripes work well with black trousers and a lightweight jacket in orange or yellow.
Orange and yellow turned up strongly in menswear: Dolce & Gabbana were offering dayglo orange hoodies and Louis Vuitton took egg yolk yellow and put it in everything from polo-shirts to socks. Summer shorts were much in evidence, and they were much more tailored than in previous years – worn with citrus coloured polo-shirts and crumpled blazers and those deck shoes again.
High fashion that it will be hard work to pull off this summer includes the harem trousers on offer for both men and women – while it’s a bit tempting to think that these loose waist, low crutch garments will hide a multitude of sins, what they actually do is suggest you have something (a big belly, a low-slung bum) to conceal, without actually hiding it. Wear them with care, and make sure they are darker than the top you choose, so that they offer something of a slimming effect.
The dream most people have is that they could keep the wisdom they’ve developed over 50 but get back the energy they had at 20. That’s not possible, but as our sense of our age largely depends on how other people respond to us, we can feel more youthful by looking it!
Dressing to give the impression of youth is easier than you think, as long as you don’t become a slave to fashion. Most of us have found a style that worked for us and stuck with it. Nothing is easier to put a date on than somebody whose clothes reflect the fashion of a decade ago.
Begin by looking at what’s fashionable. This year we’re seeing a lot of fashion clothing that’s based on workwear: for men that means a heavyweight shirt, solid work boots with thick comfortable socks turned down over the boot top. While for women it’s thick tights or leggings teamed with short textured skirts and a white hoodie or sweatshirt.
Decide on just one fashion item that you can wear – if it’s the shirt, don’t go for the boots as well, if it’s the leggings, pick a different kind of top, because most people over forty can only get away with one fashion pick per day in their wardrobe.
Take care with colour – as we age we lose the intensity of colour we have in our skin and that means that strong colours can overwhelm us. If you’re going to wear a red T-shirt, team it with a pair of classic black trousers rather than another bright colour, so you don’t ‘vanish’ into what you’re wearing.
If your hair has begun to grey, you may do better in light pale colours such as a light-blue hoodie or a grey polo-shirt as they don’t wash the colour out of your face. Alternatively you can always remove the grey – but go to a salon and get some expert advice on how to do it, as strange hair colour from dyes that ‘hide the grey’ are as aging as the grey hair itself.
Classic sweatshirts and polo-shirts combine to make versatile casual clothing options if your want to look good on a small income.
Worn alone a classic plain sweatshirt looks neutral and is good for almost all occasions, but you can team it with a bright T-shirt or a polo-shirt layered over the top for colder weather or to offer a contrasting appearance that is more casual.
Both polo shirts and sweatshirts can be worn with casual jackets which gives a sporty appearance or with jeans or shorts to offer a more relaxed impression. A sweatshirt is also a great accessory to tie around your shoulders or waist if you feel the weather might change and you don’t want to carry a jacket.
For men, it’s easy to choose two colours around which to base your wardrobe, such as blue and beige or black and white meaning that you can combine a white zipped hoodie with black trousers, jeans, shorts and chinos to give a range of clothing choices from semi-formal to totally casual. For women, more choice of colour is better, but picking a base colour such as navy blue around which to coordinate your clothing allows you to be sure that all your T-shirts, vests and camisoles work with all the clothing that you wear on your lower body. Smaller items, usually called clothing accessories, such as vests, belts and hats can be purchased in contrasting colours to offer variety.
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