Like most other eleven-year-olds, Little 'Un couldn't really give a monkey's what he wears. Quite frankly, some days it's all I can do to get any clothes on him at all - the boy's a born naturist and is perfectly comfortable lounging around the house stark naked. Which, when I think about it, is probably quite sweet because he seems very comfortable with his body and at least understands that he needs to wear clothes in public.
I've tried to explain to him that clothes are part of the way we present ourselves to the world - that we say things about ourselves with what we choose to wear. We can change others' perception of us, based on our clothes. He is about as interested in that concept as he is in any story of mine which begins "When I was your age..." which is to say, not remotely.
Undiscouraged, I remain fascinated by clothes and love shopping for them. Hong Kong, as you might imagine, is a good place to go if you share that love: there are shops everywhere. Enormous malls occupy vast amounts of space and contain almost endless shops - not just the big chains you'll know but little boutiques which you won't.
Now, I'm no clothing expert but a range of tee-shirts based on the movies of David Lynch - Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (a strong contender for most frustrating and baffling movie ever made) etc - would not have been my first suggestion. And yet, there they are on the shelves and on the chests of various hipster kids that I see around town. Have they seen Eraserhead, I wonder to myself. Do they have any idea what they're wearing or is it just a nice design? Does it even matter?
My own favourite is Uniqlo (which has a presence in the UK), branches of which I appear physically unable to walk past without entering, browsing and (more often than not) buying something. I particularly love it when they have a sale because all the "unusual" sizes that they have left over are the sizes that fit me. Hence, I've become a bit of a fiend for bargain shopping and poor Scarlet is finding her wardrobes increasingly full of my clothes!Uniqlo do fairly middle-of-the-road clothes - good price, nothing too flashy and reasonable price. They do, occasionally spring a few surprises, like with their current range of tee- shirts.
This is nothing new. Back in the 1980s (and do you have any idea how depressing that statement is, when you realise we're talking nearly 30 years ago) there was quite a vogue for having Japanese kanji on clothes. I have no idea what the symbols actually meant - if they meant anything at all - and they could have been grossly offensive, for all I know. They were on clothes because of the way they looked and the connotations they had. Interestingly, the same thing works the other way around: in Hong Kong, there are a lot of t-shirts with English writing on them.
In the same way, I imagine, as the kanji didn't always make sense, some of the "English" tee-shirts don't quite make sense, either, and I've been keeping a list of examples. My favourite was worn by a tiny, grey-haired gentleman in his 60s which just read (in big yellow letters on a mauve shirt) "Purple Rock Unicorn" which, I think you'll agree, probably says it all...
