What is one to do with thoughts that are too short for a proper blog post yet too long for Twitter? Why round them up and turn them into a fourteenth portmanteau post of course!
Hair today, gone out of style tomorrow
2016 saw me asking everybody what the name of the haircut that everybody under the age of 25 was seemingly legally obliged to have was. Nobody seemed to know. Eventually I got sick of not knowing what it was called and decided to name it myself, the Snowflake; appropriate for the generation that was sporting it. Well it turns out my name was a damn sight better than the ‘official’ name, because this week a school in England banned the style and had to name it to shame it. They called it the ‘Meet me at McDonald’s’. … I think The Snowflake is an infinitely better name. The curious thing about the Snowflake is not that it is a ridiculous hairstyle, but that it is so obviously a ridiculous hairstyle. There are certain styles that date and certain styles that do not. Bell bottoms dated, shoulder pads dated. But if you want to laugh at a Sixties suit it would be hard to do, because you’d have to pin down what defined a 60s suit, and if you have to think about it you can’t laugh at it. So with hairstyles, the more outré the style the worse it will date. The 70s perms and 80s mullets dated far worse than the 90s curtains because it was possible to do the curtain with some subtlety. It is not possible to a Snowflake with subtlety. At 00:01 1/1/2020 the generation which has taken an unprecedented number of self-portraits will shudder at how ‘last decade’ their hair looks in all of them, but it is incredibly dated right now because of its omnipresence and absurdity, and everybody who doesn’t have it can see that fact. We’re just waiting for them to.
Seasonal Clothes for the wrong season
As we await with mingled amusement and trepidation the arrival of the ‘Beast from the East’, itself almost another piece on the deliberate decline of journalistic formality, it was interesting to see the huge amount of hats and scarves being sported at Lansdowne Road today. While the poor rugby players ran about in shorts the spectators huddled together for warmth. And it’s going to get colder, much colder… Yet if you walk into Dundrum Town Centre right now and mooch through Penneys or M & S you won’t find woolly hats and rugged scarves, oh no. You will find shorts, bikinis, polo shirts, and sun-hats. Because the clothes on sale in our shops have changed seasons, as always, well in advance of the actual weather. We are about to hit the coldest stretch of the winter and the clothes offered for sale at this moment will be wearable in high summer. I need a practising economist to explain to me how this makes sense – do people really buy their wardrobes that far in advance? – doesn’t anybody suddenly need a new scarf or a heavier hat in February or March when it snows after the shops have shifted seasons? – do the shops not take a commercial beating selling clothes that won’t be needed for another five months? What’s going on, in short, and why does this happen season after season?
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