When I was younger I wanted to look like Michael Caine. It's OK. I can laugh about it now. What can I tell you? I liked his glasses.
In my defence, this is the sixties Michael Caine we're talking about here. Not the seventies version with his big sideboards and big specs and curly hair and permanent cigar. I may be a man of questionable tastes when it comes to style but not that questionable.
It wasn't so much that I wanted to look like Michael Caine. More than I wanted to look like Michael Caine in that famous David Bailey photograph. Dark suit. Heavy glasses, unlit cigarette in mouth (perfect for a non-smoker like me).
Or maybe I wanted to look like Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. The Caine who got to cook breakfast for Sue Lloyd. Obviously, I wasn't keen on the sonic torture aspect of being the Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. But the look – and the girl – would have been fine.
Our models of well-dressed masculinity are always film stars. [1] Sometimes pop stars, although that one tends to be more niche. I must admit I never aspired to wear Bowie's Ziggy outfit [2] or Prince's open coat, cravat and budgie smugglers look that he sports on the cover of 1980's Dirty Mind.
And as for footballers. Never. [3] Or hardly ever. Well, I say that, but in Northumberland earlier this year in a museum I caught an old news clip of Bobby and Jackie Charlton visiting their family home in Ashington back in the sixties – so long ago that Bobby still had a full head of hair – and they both looked mint. Smart suits. Sharp cheekbones. They looked the shizz (is that still what young people say? Or am I already so 2010?)
Thinking about it, maybe I just want to look like men did in the sixties. Before the long hair and tie-dye. When you wore a suit every day. Probably the same suit, mind, but anyway you fixed up, you looked sharp.
I say all this while sitting here in a pair of Fred & Florence jeans and a cheap T-shirt which is straining at the belly and stubble that's as convincing a beard as Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. I look less sixties, more 60something (well, it's not so very far away, let's be honest).
And yet still I yearn. Of course what that desire for 1960s-ness represents has changed for me now. When I was younger I wanted to look like the David Bailey version of Michael Caine because I wanted to look cooler than I was. These days I wouldn't mind looking like that iteration of Michael not because I would look cooler, but because I'd look younger.
To do that, though, I might need a bit more than a pair of glasses.
[1] I appreciate I am straying into Mr Didcock's Male Order territory here. He'll not talk to me after this.
[2] Though I've always fancied the dufflecoat he wears on the cover of Low and in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
[3] Even now I wake up at night screaming about Barry Venison's taste in jackets. And don't get me started on that mullet.
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