THERE comes a time, the Bible tells us, when we have to put away childish things.
Replica ChloeIt also tells us lots of other things apparently but for the purpose of this column, lets just concentrate on that one.
I only bring it up because my own time of putting away said childish things seems to have crept up on me pretty unexpectedly this week.
It happened when I was buying winter shoes, not normally something I do but it's a decision that was thrust upon me this year, all my other footwear having developed what I believe the cobbling fraternity refer to as holes.
The only shoes I had without said holes in the bottom were a pair of tasselled loafers, and they had holes in the top thanks to their perforated uppers.
Anyway, as I was browsing the racks of my local boot-ique, I made a snap decision. "I am never," I thought, "going to wear trainers ever again. Or, come to that, T-shirts."
Now, I've got nothing against the humble T-shirt. Many people have made it look very good. From Marlon Brando's plain white undershirt to Roxy Music affiliate Anthony Price's cap-sleeved number which took the garment as close to being decadent as it's possible to go, it's a perfectly acceptable thing to wear. Unless it's one of those horrible slogan numbers, or something with a cartoon character on, or a band which has been heard of by more than five people.
It just dawned on me that I hadn't really worn T-shirts very much outside my house for a while, so why not make it kind of my "thing"? The same went for the shoes. I only have one pair of trainers that gets any sort of wear, that being a very tatty set of Converse Number Ones and they're basically Nikes and have been for several years since that corporate buyout happened.
Since I was phasing out my holey shoes, why not replace them with something a bit more adult? Like a nice brogue, for example. Granted, they do make you look a bit like a Mr Man, but hey, as long as it's not "Mr Unfashionable", or "Mr Really Rubbish Shoes", then who cares? After I'd made this decision, I felt fired up. I felt more alive than I had in weeks. Especially when I realised it meant an opportunity to acquire more stuff, which always makes me feel important.
That was when I realised there might be something more to the situation than I first thought.
If I was being honest with myself, the decision to dump the T-shirts probably had very little to do with fashion. This is where the quote from the intro comes in. Clever, eh? Getting all psychological like, I can trace the roots of this T-shirt/shoe thing back to the seismic impact of my last birthday, which happened two months ago now. The tremors of ageing - and no I'm not going to tell you the number - are still being felt. If anything, the aftershocks are more devastating than the quake.
Quite frankly, it made me realise that you'd get bored of anything after more than a couple of decades, even - or perhaps especially - yourself. Changing the way you dress is probably the easiest way of freshening up a tired Fake Balenciaga Handbags persona, short of doing anything that takes real effort like getting a tattoo, giving up drinking, really interrogating your soul or something dull and rewarding like that.
Anyway, quite apart from the existential angst, my birthday made me realise things rapidly seem to be progressing towards me having to become a grown up. Dressing in a more grown up fashion is inevitably a corollary of that.
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