#29 Fashion worth fighting for.

In the 1957 movie 'Funny Face', Audrey Hepburn plays a downtrodden but educated woman who works in a bookstore; plain and dowdy. Her life is transformed when Dick Avery, a hot fashion photographer, decides she is to be the new face of Quality magazine, and, suddenly, she becomes the bleeding edge of fashionable.


I can empathise. Hepburn's experience is not unlike that which any European will has upon arrival in America. Because America, as a nation, is sartorially retarded. It is a wasteland. I've been to better-dressed homeless shelters.

Now, I'm not an individual overly concerned with fashion: I normally wear t-shirts and jeans, I have silly-coloured socks. My shirts - pure cotton though they may be - are unimaginatively plain and pinstriped, in a lazy, preppy sort of way. I do possess - and I admit this with great reticence - t-shirts with beer company logos on them. That's t-shirts. Plural. All in all, I'm no Kate Moss.

But I look decent. I don't wear white sports socks with a black suit. I don't wear shorts to restaurants. I don't own a fanny pack. I don't wear running shoes to work. I believe fedora hats had their day in the early 20th century. In fact, even a day was pushing it. (Oh, and by the way, it is customary in civilised countries to remove your hat inside. Cunts.)

Furthermore, I believe bermuda shorts to be a beach clothing item. You've already heard my opinions on baseball caps. Don't even get me started on wedding attire ("Congratulations, you looked like a complete twat on the most important day of your life").

Clearly, New York has some very fashionable people (I've even spied some harem pants of late: mais oui!), but if you speak to any of them - which I often do, in my line of work - they tend to be European. The Americans try and copy, but just don't get it. The hipsters - fedora hats, canvas shoes, capri pants, stupid, lo-fidelity headphones and badly-tuned guitars - are the worst, because they're obviously trying really hard.


In truth, New York is tolerable. But dare to venture out into New England or Jersey, and God help you. New York is a sort of halfway house - a safe haven for any would-be European visitor to start with. Like the little coves you practice windsurfing in, it helps those a little wet behind the ears to adjust. From there, they can make little weekend trips into the open ocean of sartorial carnage, so that the tsunamis of middle America don't immediately get them. One denim jeans-denim jacket combo is one thing, but try being faced by a hundred of them at once.

The whole thing is exacerbated by the obscene, graphic obesity everywhere you look. If you think a t-shirt bearing the logo of a fake girder company and it's fake date of incorporation printed faintly so as to add an air of Retro Charm is unspeakably horrendous, wait 'til you've seen it stretched hopefully, vainly over three hundred pounds of prime Yanksteak.


None of this bothers me terribly - as cultural omissions go, well-tailored trousers I can deal with. It just adds an old-fashioned air to the whole place, taken with everything else. Prices are a little cheaper, the clothes are a little 90s, the music is mostly pre-teen. They are still arguing about gay marriage. It's Europe, five years ago. Except there aren't any jobs.

P.S. Thought I should drop in a link to America's sartorial Bible: People of WalMart.

#20 The national pastime.

On paper, it sounds like a terrible sport. There are generally around five 'scores' a game. A three-hour-plus game yields six minutes of play. A tiny handful of countries play it, so there are no real international championships. There is a very real danger of suffering serious injury as a spectator. It is unusually dominated by a small group of franchises (the New York Yankees have won the World Series 27 times - that's a quarter of all championships since their 1903 beginnings).

So, I stepped into Citifields, the home of the New York Mets (New York's slightly-less-successful-but-still-pretty-good franchise) today with some reservation. I expected boredom, poverty (as is de rigeur in professional sports spectation, refreshments are seen as an opportunity to lavishly rape fans with 1,000%-plus mark ups on soda, beer, etc.), and lots of obnoxious loudmouths.

I wasn't disappointed. There were lots of obnoxious loudmouths. Food and soda was exorbitantly-priced. There is, shall we say, a lot of downtime. Nevertheless, baseball has more to recommend it than you may at first imagine.

Firstly, just like cricket in England, it serves a crucial social role - a place where men can go and get royally plastered over several hours and excuse it as a cultural experience. Other sports - a soccer game, for instance, or rugby - are just too brief. There's too much going on. You are forced to chug beer demonically, or watch the game seriously, but never both. What do you say to the wife when you get home? 'Did you see the goal Barry?' 'No, I was having a downing competition with Eric'.

Baseball has so little going on that you could cook several courses of classic French table d'hôte and still keep up. A mishit ball whacked a girl a few rows in front of me in the head in the first innings, seemingly knocking her unconscious, and I think she still managed to keep track of what was happening.

Secondly, it is a cast-iron opportunity to feel sartorially superior to almost everybody. I went in a filthy beer T-shirt and some threadbare canvas shoes, and I felt a bit overdressed. I wasn't even wearing any trousers. I was really. I made that up. But still, everybody looks like knobs. Especially the players.

I sat there being grumpy, quiet and not-too-gently wilted (New York is currently breaking 90 degrees daily) for three hours, refusing to stand for national anthems and generally being a dick. They play the national anthem AND 'God Bless America' at every league game, incidentally. Isn't that hilarious? Everyone takes their hats off and stays silent, too. Like, for real. And they know the words.

The most irritating thing of all for curmudgeons like yours truly - even more irritating, if you can fathom it, than people who say 'yours truly' - is the Organised Fun. Now last time I was at a European sports event (rugby, if memory serves), chants, Mexican waves and other crowd revelries arose spontaneously. Not so at a baseball game. The event managers in charge have clearly determined that baseball fans are so monumentally cretinous as not to be trusted with the responsibility of having their own fun. Chants are initiated by a pre-recorded obnoxious loudmouth over the PA system.. The crowd are frequently called upon to be as loud as possible, encouraged by a clearly-faked decibel meter. Every little tiny bit of entertainment is sponsored by some company with no discernable link to baseball ('Lincoln, The Official Town Car of the New York Mets!' 'Bridgestone, The Official Tyre of the MLB!'), and features one of a cast of thousands of cretins smiling dumbly and clutching a McDonald's alarm clock.

© Howard Schatz

Really, I quite like the game. As cycnical as I am, they are amazing athletes. I throw like a girl with rickets, so I find their 100mph, 50-yard gunshots to be rather impressive. You can almost hear humeri shattering as hits are made. The wounded in the crowd (another plus, incidentally - I expected fear of litigation to have long taken any risk out of being in the left field bleachers, but apparently not) are testament to how fast the ball moves. And there is a familial, playful atmosphere which I grudgingly admit to being Quite Nice. The open, daggers-drawn hostility of the football (soccer) field was nowhere to be found. Maybe people were just too full of hotdogs and pretzels to move.