RIP to my old band T-shirts

‘This is beginning to fall apart – I think it’s just age.’ Words spoken on the evening of my 32nd birthday. Thankfully, my wife wasn’t referring to my body or our marriage. Almost as tragic though, it was another band T-shirt, the fourth in as many weeks to finally give up the ghost.

This is no small thing for me. From about 2007 onwards, I had a reliable default outfit: band T-shirt, black skinny jeans, black Converse All-Stars (high-top). Unlike many of my peers, I escaped the early years of marriage without a wardrobe purge by my wife, and so this get-up served me well until fairly recently. But, as Auden wrote, you cannot conquer time. The jeans, sad to say, were replaced by corduroys a while back, due to a combination of Topman closing down, my waistline expanding after I hit 30 (or rather, after 30 hit me), and the Gen Z-ers in my life telling me that skinny jeans are now ‘millennial cringe’.