Clothes maketh the man. Or so claimed the inventor of the ‘Fido Dido’ t-shirt. (Believe me, they’re overdue for a comeback.) But what garments give they can just as easily take away, so the whole uneasy truth is that clothes can undo a person, regardless of gender, quicker than you can say ‘elasticized waist’. This, broadly, sums up my relationship with apparel. When I think of all the fashion statements I’ve made over the years, the vast majority of them are riddled with expletives. But it’s not my fault. You should have seen the things my father used to wear.
Clothes maketh the man. Or so claimed the inventor of the ‘Fido Dido’ t-shirt. (Believe me, they’re overdue for a comeback.) But what garments give they can just as easily take away, so the whole uneasy truth is that clothes can undo a person, regardless of gender, quicker than you can say ‘elasticized waist’. This, broadly, sums up my relationship with apparel. When I think of all the fashion statements I’ve made over the years, the vast majority of them are riddled with expletives. But it’s not my fault. You should have seen the things my father used to wear.
There are some items that never go out of style. There are others, however, that could catch three buses and a ferry and still not be anywhere near being in style. I speak, naturally, of the string vest; a garment that provided far too little in the way of mystery. It was only as an adult and when looking over some old photo albums that I noticed my father holding my younger brother, moustache bristling, smiling for the camera and unashamedly wearing a string vest. Luckily, he was wearing it on top of some type of crew-neck pullover rather than rocking it ‘free-range’. He looked like he’d just been caught by a fisherman. Or had recently returned from some kind of Austrian discothèque.
It was far from an isolated incident. My father was also a firm and unabashed supporter of ‘the formal short’. These days, when someone uses the term ‘award winning shorts’, they’re generally referring to a movie that lasts about ten minutes. But when I was a kid, it was a kind of truncated pant you wore with a belt and really long socks. These were socks that tickled your kneecaps and could only stay aloft with the help of garters. These were, in essence, pieces of elastic used to keep your socks suitably elevated whilst drastically reducing your circulation. It’s been decades since I’ve needed to wear garters. I do not miss them. Not one bit. But my father loved nothing more than to wear a pair of formal shorts and really long socks, supported by a couple of garters that could easily double as tourniquets.
If nothing else, my father has always been sensitive to the prevailing trends and refused to remain trapped in the past. He didn’t continue to wear the formal short when all around him screamed ‘surrender’. Instead, he adapted with each new decade so convincingly, it was almost as though he was undercover. In the eighties, he owned at least one pair of acid wash jeans. I’m not sure he went so far as to possess a ‘Fido Dido’ t-shirt, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had. In the nineties, he embraced the hip-hop lifestyle by purchasing a pair of inflatable tracksuit pants championed by MC Hammer. When I complained, he would point out that he’d never been more comfortable in his life. Perhaps it’s lucky for me that his interest in hip-hop couture didn’t extend to the Wu Tang Clan.
And whilst I might make fun of my father’s inept fashion sense, I have not lived a life free of sin in this regard. In year nine, I wore a jumper my uncle had rescued from the ‘lost and found’ box of the school he worked at. It was stylish, it was heavily patterned and, unlike most woolen jumpers I’d ever seen in my life, the sleeves only went to the elbows. My uncle worked at a private school in the city and, I was convinced that people who lived in town were more sophisticated and stylish than we were. It never occurred to me that it was ‘lost’ for a reason.
For a good six months in primary school, I decided to dress like a nineteenth century chimney sweep, complete with a ‘hello Guv’nor, shine your shoes?’ peaked cap. It goes without saying that ‘Chimney Sweep Chic’ did not sweep through the broader Tyabb area. At University, when trying to master a foreign washing machine, I succeeded in shrinking all my clothes by two whole sizes, but continued to wear them regardless. It made me look like I was partway through turning into the Incredible Hulk.
Like most families, we get together when we can. Most recently, we caught up for lunch at a hotel on the Peninsula. It was the kind of place where you order at the bar and the meals all come with either chips or salad. There’s a playground that seems to consist of a lot of intersecting tubes that can entertain kids for hours or, after a few too many drinks, may require adults to be extracted with the Jaws of Life. I was relaxing and chatting to my father when I noticed.
They weren’t formal shorts or the pants that MC Hammer rejects. They were exactly the same trousers that I, myself, was wearing at that exact moment. We were, it seems, dressed the same. My first reaction was to recoil whereas my father’s was to suggest that I had excellent taste – something he knew full well not to be true. My wife’s response was, perhaps, most telling of all and involved pointing her finger and shouting so that the rest of the family would notice. I could call it a coincidence, a mere dent of fate, but I’d be kidding myself. Ultimately, there’s no point trying to fight it. When it comes to family, we’re more alike than we’d care to admit. It can take the smallest thing – even a pair of trousers – to remind us.