STUPIDITY IS THE NEW BLACK

My excuse for not writing sooner is that I have been away. I spent a whole month in Melbourne performing at the Comedy Festival.

It was interesting to be back amongst the bustling metropolis of Melbourne. It is a proud city which loves to boast of its events and attractions.

One of Melbourne’s greatest claims is that it is the fashion capital of the Australia. This may be true but, unfortunately, that means Melbourne has now become the stupidest looking capital of Australia.

Today’s fashions are terrible! People love to laugh about what we wore in the seventies and eighties and blush with embarrassment at photos of themselves from those times, but seriously, there will be even more embarrassment in ten years' time from today’s fashion victims. When they look back there will be unprecedented cries of ‘what on earth was I thinking’?

I am not a style guru. I do not design fashion and would probably be considered very conservative in my tastes. But as a member of society I am surrounded by the fashions of today and as someone who has eyes and a bile duct I have to say that it all looks stupid!

For women, mismatching, formless, layered, oversized or severely undersized clothing seems to be the trend. To look cool, take the worst elements of the last thirty years’ fashion (the tackier the better) and just chuck it on. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as you finish the look by having as much of your breasts revealed as possible. Even if you barely have any to show off. If you want proof that the fashion is terrible there it is.

I am a man. I like breasts. I should be happy that they are on show everywhere I look. However, somehow the current looks even make breasts look bad. I never thought that was possible. But they bundle them uncomfortably out of shape or let them go too free or discolour them with fake tan. To a man these are desecrations of our most favourite things.

And it doesn’t stop there. If I’d been told as a teenager that in the future micro mini skirts, no underwear and tiny tops would be a trend I would have invented a time machine in a week (especially seeing as I grew up in the eighties when big, baggy clothes left literally everything to the imagination). But somehow the dream wasn’t realised. There's something disappointingly unsexy about a girl who is constantly readjusting herself and awkwardly trying to keep herself 'decent' in a display which demonstrates exactly why underwear and longer skirts were invented in the first place. And I won’t even mention the impracticality of those styles in cities like Melbourne and Hobart. It certainly gives new meaning to the term ‘frigid’.

I blame Paris Hilton. It’s a shame that she is going to prison for drink driving. She should be going to prison for crimes against fashion. Every dreadful thing she wears seems to fester through the fashion scene until fifteen year old girls everywhere cover themselves (or not cover, as the case may be) with it. I guess we can expect prison overalls to be the next big fashion sensation.

Then we come to the men’s fashion. There was a time when someone like myself could walk into a clothing store and find at least one shirt that wouldn’t make me look like a dickhead. Not any more. Unless you want to look like the latest Big Brother evictee or an R&B star you will never own new clothes again. And even the new clothes aren’t new. Now we are expected to pay hundreds of dollars for jeans that are in worse condition that the old ones you are trying to replace.

The thing that really amazes me is how we as a society buy into fashion. Who comes up with it and how on earth do they convince people that it looks good? We have all looked back on fashions from the past and thought they looked bad. So the question is why did we think it looked good then? Did it really look good then or did it look stupid and were we just brainwashed into thinking that it looked great?

Clearly something very weird is going on. You would think that taste is something inherent to our individual psychologies. But one can only assume that it is not and that it is somehow influenced or conditioned by our environment. The more we see something the more we think it looks ok. Like some kind of hypnotism we accept something which we would have never agreed to before, like wearing ugg boots in public.

If this is true then we are susceptible to anything. We will accept whatever is around us. Hang out with clowns and you will want to look like a clown. And we do look like clowns.

Fashion is a joke. I’m beginning to suspect that there is someone in the world sitting back and laughing ‘Hahahaha. I can’t believe I convinced them to wear that. Let’s see what else they’ll try on’. It is an industry that preys on insecurity and conformity and it will probably be around for ever.

Rush in! The Emperor’s new clothes are now on sale.