Felix Desmarais: How to be fashionable

An transitional stage between bike shorts and board shorts. Felix Desmarais, age 10.

OPINION:

I have always been something of a creature of habit.

Others phrase it a bit differently - that I’m stuck in my ways like a crotchety 90-year-old man (no disrespect to 90-year-old men; I hope to be one someday, and I’ll probably be crotchety, too).

This has almost always translated through to my fashion choices. I use ‘fashion’ lightly here, in the same way one might talk about a pizza with tinned spaghetti on it as ‘cuisine’. It’s technically true, but it shouldn’t be.

I have worn a kind of uniform my whole life.

As a child, this was (strictly) unwashed hair (I will not shower), a baggy t-shirt, bike shorts and bare feet.

There was no amount of cajoling my parents could do to make me dress like anything less than a feral Nickelodeon-era Mowgli. Nothing could be done.

Nothing would change, only the choice of uniform.

In my teens, it was a pair of board shorts and a singlet. Always branded - a surf brand ideally. My feet, no longer bare but cushioned within skate shoes the size of two-seater couches, never deigned to touch a surfboard (let alone a skateboard, for that matter), but that wasn’t the point. That was the uniform, and I wore it diligently.

In my 20s, it was the 2010s. I lived in Wellington and was doing an arts degree, and you could tell. Dyed black hair fell over my face, tickling the touch of eyeliner I applied to make it look like I’d been crying (’I swear, it just looks like I’ve been crying’). Black skinny jeans were tucked into eight-up Doc Martens and paired with an ironic second-hand T-shirt with sweat rot under the arms. Been there, done that, and bought the Slipknot T-shirt - and never listened to them once.

You’ve probably inferred it from that getup, but just in case you didn’t know, I was 21 and thought a lot of deep thoughts, which sometimes I expressed by writing poems in Moleskine notebooks in cafes.

I want to say I don’t remember any of the poems, but I unfortunately do, and now we must all live with the consequences. My burden is your burden:

I sleep all day because

Last night was last morning

Eyes wide open until the dawning

That beautiful evening that was not noon nor night...

Right-o mate, so you slept in because you stayed up all night. Truly groundbreaking. Get in Walt Whitman, we’re going rhyming.

Felix Desmarais finds it difficult to wear colour. Here he is dressed inexplicably as a stage hand. Photo / Zizi Sparks

As I hit 30 and became a professional, the Doc Martens returned, but now in Chelsea boot style, because I am a good tax-paying upstanding citizen. I take the position of investing in one good item that will last: the boots, a good warm merino jumper, mid-range jeans or chinos.

Some habits die hard though - the skinny jeans remained, and my hangover from Wellington: a penchant for an all-black outfit (and quiffed hairstyle) means my workmates have taken to calling me Johnny Cash or John Travolta.

It could be worse: I’m 5′5″, so I’m lucky no one calls me Danny DeVito.

But I’d rather be a comfortable 90-year-old crotchety Danny DeVito than try to be anything other than myself - and that is true style.

• Felix Desmarais is a journalist and a mostly-former stand-up comedian.