Félix Desmarais: How to be fashionable

OPINION:

I’ve always been kind of a regular.

Others put it a little differently – that I’m stuck in my ways like a grumpy 90-year-old man (no disrespect to 90-year-old men; I
I hope to be one someday, and I’ll probably be grumpy too).

This almost always translated into my fashion choices. I use the word “fashion” lightly here, in the same way that one might refer to a pizza with canned spaghetti as “cuisine”. That’s technically true, but it shouldn’t be.

I’ve worn some kind of uniform all my life.

As a kid, it was (strictly) unwashed hair (I won’t shower), baggy t-shirt, bike shorts, and bare feet.

There was no amount of cajoling my parents could do to get me to dress like anything other than a wild Nickelodeon-era Mowgli. Nothing could be done.

Nothing would change, only the choice of uniform.

In my teens, it was a pair of swim shorts and a bathing suit. Always branded – a surf brand ideally. My feet, no longer bare but snug in skate shoes the size of a two-seater couch, never deigned to touch a surfboard (let alone a skateboard, for that matter), but there was not the question. It was the uniform, and I wore it diligently.

In my 20s, it was the 2010s. I was living in Wellington and studying arts, and it showed. Dyed black hair fell across my face, tickling the touch of eyeliner I applied to make it look like I’d cried (“I swear, that’s just looks as if I had cried). Black skinny jeans were tucked into Doc Martens eights and paired with a tongue-in-cheek second-hand t-shirt with underarm sweat. I went there, did that and bought the Slipknot t-shirt – and never listened to them once.

You probably deduced it from this outfit, but just in case you didn’t know, I was 21 and had a lot of deep thoughts, which I sometimes expressed by writing poems in Moleskine notebooks in cafes.

I mean I don’t remember any of the poems, but unfortunately I do, and now we all have to live with the consequences. My burden is your burden:

I sleep all day because

Last night was the last morning

Eyes wide open until dawn

This beautiful evening that was neither noon nor night…

Alright buddy, so you slept because you stayed up all night. Truly revolutionary. Enter Walt Whitman, we’ll rhyme.

When I hit 30 and turned pro, the Doc Martens came back, but now in the style of Chelsea boots, because I’m a good honest tax-paying citizen. I take the decision to invest in a single good item that will last: boots, a good warm merino sweater, jeans or mid-range chinos.

Some habits die hard though – the skinny jeans stuck and my Wellington hangover: a fondness for an all-black outfit (and a puffy hairstyle) meant my co-workers started calling me Johnny Cash or John Travolta.

It could be worse: I’m 5’7, so I’m lucky no one calls me Danny DeVito.

But I’d rather be a cozy 90-year-old Danny DeVito than try to be anything other than myself — and that’s the real style.