Why I detest clothes with words on

As a provincial teenage virgin with ideas so far above my station that they gave me vertigo, I frequently reflected bitterly that whoever coined the phrase ‘Schooldays are the best days of your life’ must have come to that conclusion after being involved in a serious car-crash the evening following their last day at school, probably rendering them a tetraplegic. And the little thing which summed up how thoroughly inappropriate it was was the horridness of name tags. All the wondrous beings I had it in me to be, written off by my mum’s humdrum hand in those four syllables: Julie Burchill.

Then and there, I took a violent dislike to clothing with writing on. In the 1980s I was repelled by the rise of designer clothing. Excuse me, but who ever dreamt of growing up to be a sandwich-board man, with all respect? It got even worse when the author’s message took over; top of my loathe list was the trendy tat-touter Katharine Hamnett, whose infamous T-shirts — CHOOSE LIFE, 58% DON’T WANT PERSHING— made my eyes cross in fury.

Imagine my glee when my second husband’s bezzie starting sleeping with her and we were asked over for ‘supper’; we’d barely sat down before she was dropping bons mots. ‘The young poor dress so much better than the young rich,’ she drawled. ‘That’s because the young poor can’t afford your clothes!’ I came right back. She had her boy toy show us the door, but I’ve often recalled that evening when I pass yet another halfwit walking down the street bearing the legend NO WAR, SAVE THE FUTURE or, best of all, NO MORE FASHION VICTIMS in big black letters on a baggy white T.

Most of all, I think of the immortal words of Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?’ When I see someone wearing clothing with words on my first reaction is usually, ‘Ooo, I bet you’re really boring!’

It’s not just clothes with legends or logos on, either; it is my experience generally that the more trouble people take with their appearance, the duller the company they are.