When it comes to dressing, best to let it all hang loose

Is it a father thing to always tuck your shirt inside your trousers?” was the question from one of the teenage sons recently – as though I thought I was Superman and was actually wearing my underpants outside my pants.

The truth is that sometimes it’s just the only way to ensure the public is spared an unsightly glimpse of an ever-expanding waistline – although it can also be seen as yet another indication of the different approach to sartorial style among the generations.

Because you’d sooner find a Poor Clare downing pints in a public house than a teenager with their shirt neatly tucked inside their pants – and that even goes for when they’re wearing their school uniform.

It’s as though the world would spontaneously combust if top and bottom were even to touch off off each other, never mind sticking to the original reason for wearing clothes – keeping the cold out.

So shirts today are invariably worn loosely outside trousers – if indeed shirts are worn at all. And just in case the shirt would accidentally sneak inside the trousers, jeans are worn at half mast to leave seriously branded underpants exposed for all to see.

Back in the day the only reason to worry about the state of your underwear was the chance that medics would have to cut through your outer garments if you were unlucky enough to be hit by a bus. But today your choice of pants is apparently a fashion statement – so elasticated waistbands now carry more branding that Lansdowne Road.

Shoes may have shoelaces but that doesn’t mean you have to acknowledge their existence by actually tying them – and if you did tie them, you must never loosen them again because it’s much more rewarding to spend ten minutes wriggling into them with the laces still closed.

You must also ensure that you never take the weather into account when choosing your clothing for any particular day. Chief crime in this area is wearing a coat in the rain – you must never wear something that serves as practical a purpose as keeping you dry when you’d look much hipper with a tee-shirt and hoodie permeating the water through to your skin.

One area that we oldies have to give ground on, however, is the predilection for dark clothing in summer time. It used to be that we were told to wear white in summer, since white clothing is supposed to keep us cool — but it doesn’t.

In fact, black clothing is the best way to keep cool in the heat. Apparently it’s just basic physics. It is true that white clothing does reflect the sun’s rays back, instead of letting them cook us – but the problem is that heat comes from two directions….because it’s trying to get out of you as well. When all that sweaty, body heat hits the white clothing, it is reflected right back towards the body. So when we wear white, we effectively cook ourselves.

Thus for once the kids and the Goths are right – because black may absorb everything coming in from the sun, but it also absorbs energy from the body instead of reflecting it back.

But winning one battle does not guarantee success in the war – and anyway they really only choose their fashion sense by watching what we do….and then doing exactly the opposite.

Thus we wear shirts tucked into trousers with no sign of underwear – unless you include the odd string vest – and they let it all hang loose. But in our own way, we too once were rebels too because when our fathers wore their neat shirts and ties; remember those three-button bottle green bellbottoms or flared jeans and open-neck shirts that had round bits at either end of the collar?

So each generation to its own it seems – and by and large we should stick to the script. Because there’s nothing worse that some middle-aged bloke who still thinks he’s eighteen and dresses in a way that would only be appropriate if you actually were a teenager.

Think how embarrassed you’d have been if your own father turned up at the school gate to greet you, wearing flared bellbottoms and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tie-dye tee-shirt.

Remember that next time you think it might be cool to let the waistband of your jockeys be seen by the great unwashed.