Raspberry berets off to the fashion industry for once again trying to sell customers another idea that costs a fortune and looks daft on all but a few.
This time it is “Haute Scruff”, as seen on Katie Holmes, Mary-Kate Olsen and other dedicated and oft-photographed followers of edgy fashion.
The style, as suggested by the name, is ultra-casual. On Holmes it consisted of flat sandals, grey joggers, an over-sized shirt, damp hair in need of a comb, and a tote bag big enough to carry 5lbs of potatoes and a kitchen sink to wash them in.
None of it was cheap, natch, with one fashion editor pricing the shirt at £300 and the bag £2000.
Holmes looks great, she always does, but what happens when this look filters down to the likes of thee and me? I’m talking to you, Sue Gray, Boris slayer and Downing Street chief of staff.
Gray likes clothes and is usually well-turned out. She has a biker jacket that’s highly covetable, for instance, and her winter coat game is a cut above.
But this week she was snapped in an approximation of the Haute Scruff look, in her case a matching shirt and trousers with a cardigan on top.
“That’s nice,” I thought. “Exactly the kind of thing I would wear. Comfy.”
And that’s when I knew Sue was in fashion trouble. She looked as if she had left the house still wearing her pyjamas, and no-one had been kind enough to tell her. Keir Starmer, with whom she was pictured, was clearly distracted with something else, the latest double-digit pay demand perhaps.
We’ve all done it, and some of us actually were in our PJs at the time. But there’s a time and place for that kind of outfit, and it’s about 10am on a Sunday in the supermarket.
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