Sunglasses at Night

Every day, all over the nation, thousands of people are living a lie. You are - in all probability – one of these very perpetrators of falsehood. The crime is a widespread fashion felony: Disregarding the true function of your clothing.

AskBronny uncovers just a few fashion fads and fundamentals with forgotten purposes:

1. Jeans
Initially created for Italian sailors, the first pairs of Levi’s jeans were patented in 1873, becoming popular amongst manual industries and [outstandingly], Cowboys. In the 1950s, cult movies with Marlon Brando and James Dean saw jeans reinvented as a symbol of youthful rebellion. Fast-forward to today and almost everyone between 5 and 50 has at least one or eight pairs. Most of these people are not sailors, miners or cowboys; even if they were, they would be unlikely to wear jeans in most of their contemporary manifestations to wrangle a calf or travel from port-to-port in. If I even attempt to bend over in my skinny-cuts I face crippling disfigurement, let alone travelling into the belly of the earth with a pick and torch in them.

2. Safari wear
There have been other short-lived but memorable fads where function was destroyed by naïve consumers. The Safari jacket was embraced by many a professor, accountant and amateur porn photographer – who celebrated the light cotton/drill multi-pocketed coat in all its khaki/beige glory. Although the many pockets were useful for all sorts of paraphernalia, the fact is that many of the wearers of the safari jacket had and will never come close to a realistic jungle encounter. What about camouflaged cargo pants, military jackets and standard-issue identikit tags? The only war many of the wearers of these items may face will be the battle to find a seat on the train at peak hour. Although an identity tag might prove handy after one-too-many champers…     

3. Trackies
First emerging in the 1950s, track-pants were designed primarily for the use of sportspeople – for athletes to don before and after physical competitions. Variations saw track-pants as garments worn for running in and as a key element of the gym work-out. The irony is that this destructively unattractive piece of apparel has been lauded as an icon by generations of couch-potatoes: How many times have you collapsed, knee-high in twisties, in front of a C-Grade chick flick in a sacred tryst with your trackie-dacks? Imagine the poor designers, working tirelessly with scientists to come up with an aerodynamic wind-resistant body-sculpting trouser, only for an idle lass with an expired gym membership to wear on her drive to the Seven-Eleven to fetch a Snickers and a New Idea.

4. Trucker Caps
A few years ago my most favourite accessory was a trucker cap. I wore it so often that part of my head still has a permanent patch of ‘hat hair’. Now I don’t drive one truck, let alone many trucks to necessitate the donning of such a manly symbol. I purchased it at an inflated price from a shop that sold ‘Sex-Pistols’ t-shirts to a generation who have no idea who Sid Vicious was – a place a true Trucker would doubtlessly never frequent.

Of course there are hundreds of other prime examples – belts that hold up nothing, wearing sunglasses at night and exterior corsets – the reality is that anything purely functional might one day materialise into high fashion. Bring on the strait-jackets…