just suppose an alien had dropped in for the Commonwealth Games and decided to stay on a for a bit of clothes shopping so he could really nail the autumn-winter 2014 look when he returned to his home planet.
Just suppose he had, where would he turn for fashion guidance?
Well, if he was above average IQ - I am told most aliens are - then obviously this column would be his first port of call. If this column was unavailable, or was being used to wrap a fish supper somewhere, he might reasonably turn to a men's fashion magazine instead. Bad move - at least if he thought what he saw in the adverts was any kind of pointer to what real human men will be wearing when the nights set in.
I'll give you an example. If he opened his magazine at a certain Dolce & Gabbana ad doing the rounds of the glossies, he would think there were gangs of chisel-jawed young men wandering the streets in chunky, knitted charcoal grey balaclava snoods with matching jumpers.
Of course he would be wrong. (It is a forest scene, if that helps you imagine it, and in the background are three more models in suits and waistcoats, with flat caps and white shirts buttoned to the neck. It's kind of Game Of Thrones-meets-Peaky Blinders, but not in a way that makes any kind of sense at all.)
From the Burberry and Dior ads, he would learn stonewash denim car coats and purple and midnight blue travelling rugs look really trendy over a jacket and trousers (they don't).
From the Brioni and Etro ads he would learn that the go-to look for suits this season is for them to be made out of patches and fastened with a dressing gown cord (it isn't). And quite what he would take from pictures of an old grey-haired guy in a double-breasted suit walking along a Victorian pier is anyone's guess. Sorry, I should have said: that's Paul Weller advertising Daks.
My favourite is the Vivienne Westwood ad. Here, the lady herself models a grey suit made from a garishly-patterned material with trousers held up by a thick white braces, a blue shirt in a similar design, a cravat and an over-sized top hat in cream felt that looks like what would happen if Oor Wullie's bucket mated with a Liquorice Allsort. Mind you, all that is pretty subtle next to the footwear, an unholy fusion of a wellington, a cowboy boot and the sort of stack-heeled wedges David Bowie inflicted on the world in his Ziggy Stardust days. Only in gold, blue and mauve. Even the most silver-tongued Glasgow patter-merchant would be struck dumb if our alien walked into the boozer in that rig.
If you think I'm being harsh on these ads and the so-called creatives who come up with the concepts behind them, take a gander at an Indian fashion shoot titled The Wrong Turn that made headlines last week for all the wrong reasons. In what appears to be a reference to the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in 2012, an exquisitely-clothed woman tangles with a group of men on a bus. It has caused outrage in India - and even a Martian could figure out why.
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