Personal Blogs

So just what is it with Superdry t-shirts and their sizing, then? I mean, I know they’ve got that Japanese retro thing going on, but is it really necessary to size clothes so that ‘medium’ equates to about 5ft nothing with waist and chest sizes that would seem more appropriate as collar sizes? No: It’s stupid – and I’ll be glad when the tide of fashion has turned against them and their overpriced, undersized products and normal service has been resumed.

And the same applies to ‘skinny jeans’, which look good on around 10% at most of the people currently wearing them and pretty bloody awful on everyone else. Had I not used it just a couple of weeks ago to illustrate the hideous arses of those insane women injecting themselves with bathroom sealant and superglue I’d have dug out my stock photo of Kenny Everett impersonating Rod Stewart to make my point, but as I did I won’t. Instead I’ll just remind all skinny jean wearers that unless you fall precisely within the correct weight-to height-to-build ratio – which has a leeway of about three ounces tops either way, making it highly improbable – you’re more likely to look like Max Wall or a pair of burst sossidges from behind than you are to look like Kate Moss or Russell Brand.

And even if you do happen to fit that magic weight/height/build ratio the chances are you’re still going to look bloody awful, because the slightest defect will be magnified out of all proportion, turning big feet into clown’s feet, knobbly knees into tennis-ball sized goitres and dancers calves into sides of bacon. Anyone with even a hint of bow-leggedness will look like a discarded wishbone, while their knock-kneed cousins will shuffle along looking like something out of a George A. Romero zombie flick, giving rise to speculation about a host of medical conditions ranging from thrush to rickets and/or double incontinence. Honestly, it’s really not a good look.

Of course, I’m not bothered for myself – I gave up on fashion years ago, acknowledging that regardless of how much I spend on clothes I will always, within about five minutes of getting dressed to go out, end up looking like a sack of shit tied up in the middle – but it does irk me that my lovely, well proportioned 15 year old son has had to return the ‘medium’ t-shirt he got bought for his birthday and exchange it for an EXTRA LARGE purely to ensure that he doesn’t look like he’s wearing a 12 year old girl’s crop top.

Now I’m the first to admit that ‘medium’ isn’t going to cut it for him anymore, and I said that to his BFF (who bought him said tee) as soon as I saw the label. Truth is, at 6’2 he is large, even by today’s standards, but with a 34in waist he’s certainly not disproportionately large in any direction, so the implication that he’s extra large is definitely an exaggeration, isn’t it? Yet if he wants to wear Superdry T-shirts (which he does) and he wants to cover his belly-button (which he does) and he doesn’t want to look like the guy on the front cover of Fat Boy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (which he doesn’t), he has to tar himself with that wholly inappropriate label purely at the whim of some (presumably) shortarse, skinny-minnie marketing director with a Napoleon complex who’s not prepared to accept the fact that he or she is actually an ‘extra small’.

I mean, no wonder so many kids these days are struggling with a negative body image, I arsk ya!