Two Chaps Talking

Dear boy,

How I sympathise, sitting here in London, sweating like a therapist.

You're not alone in your loathing of the Gap. A brief flick through a nearby marketing tome suggested that it is supposed to stand for 'Great American Public', their intended demographic. Were that indeed true, one would expect to see racks of vastly oversized leisure suits in hideous colours of velour bearing decals of cuddly kittens and baseball caps with the logos of beer and tractor companies. Intrigued, I delved further, locating an urban legend that it actually stands for 'Gay And Proud', supposedly a reference to its origins in San Francisco. An amusing theory but, frankly, most gay men I know have far too much taste to be seen in khakis. As with all urban legends it's wise to check with www.snopes.com, which informs us that...

"Gap Inc. was founded in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher as a single store staffed by a handful of employees. The retailer took its name in homage to "the generation gap," a term popular in the late 1960s describing the intellectual, ethical, and social gulf between young people and their parents' generation".

...which would be lovely if it was still true.

You're the expert in these things, Old Top, but it strikes me that the GAP chooses styles and palettes each season that are so distinctively undistinguished that they scream their provenance far more obviously than any large and tasteless logo. This summer, on this side of the pond, at least, it's a carefully crafted pastiche of grunge/skater/combats/college kid that looks mannered enough on a teenager but beyond appalling on an adult.

Fortunately I had a gig last week, teaching at a large UK art college whose name, for reasons of discretion, I shall gloss lightly over. I was able to ask a room full of students why they would consider shelling out £40 for a pair of recreated washed-out combats that purported to make them look like students.

If it was just students that would be fine - they can dress how the hell they like - God knows, almost anything looks good on you when you're 20 - but, and here I'll lapse momentarily into marketingspeak, it's the phenomenon of the 'kidult' or 'adultescent' that really makes the blood run cold. Why grown-ups who can afford more and know better persist in dressing like children is an unending source of amazement to me.

Any event one attends now is populated mainly by idiots on corporate jollies so cocktail parties, concerts, the opera, the races, regattas, college balls are full of people who are not there because they want to be but through some mean spirited belief that they're getting something for nothing so they might as well. This means that the dress code becomes looser by the day. On the rare occasions I'm now asked to turn up at something in a suit or in black tie, I'm surrounded by people who've either knocked up some parody of an ensemble from the depths of the wardrobe or who have ignored the code altogether. It's almost like an unwritten rule. 'Wherever there are more than four men in black tie, one will be wearing either a) a coloured tie and/or cummerbund b) ironic sneakers c) sunglasses or d) a plastic gun in a shoulder holster. Often someone is wearing all four.

Though it pains me beyond measure to admit it - Even the bloody Americans do better than this.

A fortnight ago I had to run a conference at the Grand in Brighton. As you'll remember, it's a stupendous Edwardian erection with a stunning cast iron staircase and view over the rusting bones of the old pier. The ghosts of Pinkie and Neville Heath stalk the corridors and fragrant old ladies take tea in the conservatory every afternoon. It's clichŽ to compare Brighton to a blowsy but much loved old brass but the Grand makes the comparison inevitable.

What is saddest is that, as the English seaside holiday has lost ground to the cheap package to Florida, the grand hotels have been forced to turn to the conference market to survive and that means a hotel awash with low-rent salarymen. Away from the battery hutch of his stinking office, the English yuppie is a repellent creature. The foyer, dining rooms and, though it almost makes me weep to write it, the cocktail bar were stuffed with improperly dressed men. Though most of the women strove to make an effort, the decerebrate and oafish males wore combinations of tropical shirts, random lengths of trouser and hideous 'technical' sandals. Why? Why do these idiots feel that the only way to express the fact that they have momentarily escaped the cosh of commerce is to dress like gibbons in a fancy dress box? Is this the only place they feel they can rebel?

Of the 'Hawaiian' shirt there is little to say. They are amusing collectors items. They might be ironically appropriate at a beach party in Los Angeles but otherwise are worn only by overweight men concealing either a belly at the front or a handgun at the back. A man with nothing to hide has no need of a Hawaiian shirt

What, then, is the point of a three quarter length trouser? God knows plus fours have been a source of ribald amusement since the 20s. Is there any reason to suppose that manufacturing them out of recycled water bottles in a South East Asian sweatshop and branding them with a swooshstika makes them any less ridiculous today?

And what, pray, is a technical sandal? A sandal is not a shoe. It is that philosophical impossibility - something that is defined by a negative. A sandal is simply that which is not a shoe. The sandal is what people wear when they haven't got shoes. It's a bit of a shoe held, makeshift, to the foot. Cavemen would have worn shoes if they had them. Kalahari tribesmen would probably go for a sensible closed hiking boot if offered the opportunity and, after years of debate, theologians have finally acknowledged that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ would have worn a bench-made brogue with a commando sole and a sensible pair of calf-length lisle socks in a sober, ecclesiastical black.

You can't make a sandal 'Technical'. What the fuck is it for? Extreme ecumenical discussion? High-impact tactical folk singing? If a sandal makes the wearer look ridiculous, I can only assume that an extreme sandal is designed to make one look extremely ridiculous.

It would be odious to rehash the old jokes about the British being a workshy nation but, as the last of our noble manufacturing industries sinks into the sludge and we become a nation of call centres located in a heritage themepark, the culture of skiving has mutated into a science of expenses abuse. As their company has sprung to send them somewhere gorgeous, the natural reaction is not to enjoy it in the prescribed manner but to dress in a calculated insult to the grandeur of the surroundings and to drink the bar dry of alcopops before lurching back to the suite to be half heartedly fellated by a bored PA.

I know you are a man of passion and one easily roused to ire at poor behaviour in others so I can only say that I was glad you weren't there in person. Watching two perfect old Brighton dames, trying to have high tea while the tables around them dissolved into anarchy was profoundly shaming. They poured the lapsang in cotton gloves while some marketing trollop at a nearby table related in a loud clear voice, and to no-one in particular, how she'd been porked into pelvic trauma by a fireman on a week in Ibiza and was now trying to shift a particularly stubborn infection of the urinary tract. It was a contrast that did not show contemporary English womanhood at its best.

Re. the Beeb. I've recently taken delivery of a new digital radio. It looks refreshingly like a proper wireless and sounds brilliantly clear even in the cavern of my basement kitchen but best of all it allows me to receive one of the new digital stations, BBC7.

This comprises uninterrupted repeats of archive BBC comedy including My Word, Round the Horne, the Navy Lark, the Goons and further riches too wonderful to elucidate. I understand it is accessible via your broadband connection. I feel we have much to learn from Messrs Muir and Norden.

Yours Aye.

T