White Socks

This is the first article on fashion which I have ever written.  Every now and again, I feel like I’ve got the hang of what ‘fashion’ is.  I go to the shops, I look for it, I find it in the Sales section, I congratulate myself on finding it at a discount price, I leave the shops, and by the time I’m got outside I find that ‘fashion’ has changed.

Then I get home and read The Guardian and see that the ‘fashion’ I just purchased is made out of the bone marrow of Nepalese orphans.  Oy Vey.

‘Fashion’ is not my favourite of things.  If hair and skin were warmer, that’s all I’d wear. But even then, I’m sure people would find a way of wearing hair and skin just, like, you know? and I’d be told I was wearing it more like well… oh.

But I thought that – with some frequent reminders to get haircuts from my mother – I was at least putting on an OK facade of ‘fashion’.  This was until a day last month, when I was at a friend’s house, and it was noticed that I was both not playing a sport and wearing white socks.  White socks.

White.  Socks.

I was told to leave the building right away, and that I had disgraced my hosts.  Never have I felt so humiliated in all my life.

I wept.

But, after coming to terms with this experience, and researching the matter on the internet, I’ve realised that it certainly was I who was in error.  James Bassil, the Fashion Correspondent at Ask Men, calls the ‘no white socks’ rule “timeless” and “incontrovertible”.  What a fool I was.  He gives a rigorous four-point proof of this rule:

1) White socks don’t match anything.

2) White socks get dirty.

3) White socks are sportswear.

4) White socks are too easy.

How nincompoopious I had been not to check with the Fashion Correspondent of Ask Men before wrapping up my toes in that foul, inappropriate colour.  A fraudulent colour, which lied to everyone, telling them that I wanted to play tennis, when all I really wanted was to have a few drinks.  A schizophrenic kind of colour, that alternated between providing comfort and whispering in the ears of others that I was going to break out in a 100m sprint at any moment.    An impure colour, that was practically begging to be sullied by any old other colour (even green).  A whore of a colour.  And an easy whore.

An easy, fraudulent, schizophrenic, wretched colour.  Was it such a surprise that literally nothing matched this colour?  Nothing wants to match white socks.

I felt slightly cheered up when I read on The Guardian that actually I had just been “subversive” and taken a “bold fashion step”. But then I realised that this article had been written in 2003, and that white socks had come in and out of fashion 17 times since then.

So I’m not going to wear socks anymore.

Until the head monkey at Paris puts on white socks, and all the monkeys the world over do the same.

Postscript:

Abhinav Bajpai: “You know who else wears white socks?  Michael Jackson.  And he’s a dead paedophile*.”

* alleged.