Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  That particular hat brings me to one of the thornier problems addressing the ageing male in post-twentieth-century Britain. What to wear on your head. It seems to me that in the forties and fifties it was easy. Once you hit adulthood in those golden years of the hat, you started wearing a trilby, which you wore all your life, rain or shine, hairy or bald, until you died. You didn’t have to look for the right sort of hat, you didn’t have to worry about what it might be saying about you or whether you looked right in it, whether it suited your face or personality. It was like an arranged marriage. Like it or lump it, you two were going to be together and you had to try and make it work.

  But what a challenge it is nowadays to find something that doesn’t make you look stupid, American or pretentious. I’ve tried them all, more or less. The baseball cap is not an option unless you are actually playing a sport that requires the sun and your hair to be kept out of your eyes. There is absolutely no excuse to wear one at any other time. Americans can do it, but they enjoy spray-on cheese and Billy Joel, so I rest my case. The denim variety are also popular with East Europeans, I’ve noticed, and I’ll admit they do go well with stone-washed denim, but only if you want to look like a low-level thug in a James Bond or Jason Bourne movie.

  The trilby is a no-go because of fashion. It doesn’t go with most modern clothes, and unless you have a really thin face, like David Bowie, you look like a rent collector in one. A comedian friend of mine who started dabbling in serious acting took up with a trilby at the same time. He looked fucking ridiculous, and I toyed with a number of ways to break this to him. I suggested that the great tragedy of hat-wearing is that the person who goes to all the effort never gets to enjoy the end result. You take all the risk in walking out with it, and then it’s a free show for everyone else. But he only stopped when his wife told him that no one was going to take him any more seriously as an actor just because he was wearing one of those on his head.

  The cap is a bit odd unless you’re Terry Scott dressing as a schoolboy, an actual schoolboy, or you belong to a cricket or rowing team. The beany looks bloody awful, and so does that weird new hat that youngish people like Russell Brand wear, like a sort of knitted head sock. It just makes you look like you’ve suffered a head injury. Which in Russell’s case may well be true.

  Maybe it’s me, though. Maybe it’s just that my head doesn’t suit hats, it’s too doughy and lopsided and jowly and creased. Although I did find one hat that seemed to work. It was a doughy, lopsided, heavily creased fez I bought many years ago to wear with a monocle bought at considerable expense at the same time. The monocle was needed because I’d always wanted to have one to pop out of my eye when a comely young lady walked past. It seemed funny at the time, but I now realize it was just creepy and weird and pointless, like a lot of things I did in the nineties. In case you’re wondering, I’ve also tried both the bowler and the top hat as possible accessories, and both make me look even more ridiculous. I wore the bowler to a premiere with the family one night and I looked like an Oliver Hardy tribute act. The top hat has only been worn twice. Once when I went to Buckingham Palace to collect my OBE – that’s a nice day out. The second time was when I performed as the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine in a rather strange show put on for the Queen’s eightieth birthday in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Wearing it, my resemblance to the Fat Controller was so alarming that I was faced with the choice of either sticking with the top hat and going on a crash diet to negate the Controller vibe, or never wearing it again. The hat looks perfectly happy on the top shelf of my wardrobe, so I think I’ll leave it there.

  I suppose this pathological and rather tiring need not to dress like everyone else began with punk rock. It happens to be punk rock because that was what was happening when I became a young man, keen to style myself differently from the way my parents had dressed me, their choices being predominantly governed by whether something was cheap, durable and inoffensive. That’s not to say they didn’t indulge us when they could. My brothers and I all had matching flared jeans which my mother had painstakingly hand-embroidered with the word ‘Wombles’ on one leg. To be honest, I never really liked the Wombles – I always felt slightly depressed when they came on. Even as a kid I knew that an animated adventure about tidying up a common was never really going to get the pulse pounding. Tom and Jerry or the Clangers would have been a much better bet, and I’d even have preferred Hector from Hector’s House , but it was the Wombles my mum went for, without thinking to consult her little fashion victims. But most often it was cheap, durable and inoffensive clothing they went for, although they were prepared to sacrifice the last criteria providing the first two were met.

  So, striking out on my own, it dawned on me that how you looked, how you dressed and how you did your hair was the key to the way the rest of the world identified you. Straight trousers suggested you were forward-thinking, and a skinny tie showed you were hip and not some old bloke, just as spiky hair made it clear that you weren’t still listening to Fleetwood Mac albums. All of which were important distinctions to make at the tail end of the 1970s. But it wasn’t really until I finished school and university and started working full time that I began to get it right when it came to clothes. By which I mean getting it right for me, not the rest of the world, who often wonder out loud why I don’t invest in a light for my dressing room. Philistines.

  At the time I started working for a living, around 1981–2, there was a growing awareness among men in the media that it was perhaps a good thing to pamper themselves and preen a little bit, like women did. And by the mid-eighties, men’s grooming was becoming so de rigueur that you could hardly open a magazine without seeing an article on men’s fashion or moisturizers or gels. Hair products for boys seemed to take up more shelf space in chemists and supermarkets than ever before in the history of mankind. We’re paying the price now, living in a world inhabited by young men who almost all end in pointy bits. If you squint next time you walk down the high street you’ll find it easy to imagine that most of the lads are wearing crowns, so prevalent is the spiky head/too-much-gel look. But in the eighties it seemed daring and exciting, and the old brands tried to jump on board as well. Tru Gel and Brylcreem even made a brief comeback at one point, which is weird because if you’ve ever tried them then, like me, you will have wondered exactly what they were meant to do for you. Apart from leave a nasty stain on your pillow.

  So it was the post-punk years, and we’d just swaggered through the New Romantic movement, at the height of which it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see a bloke walking through the West End of London dressed as a pirate. That was a fun time. All bets were off and you were allowed to step out in fancy dress any night of the week, regardless of where you were going.

  I was now working, so I had to think about buying clothes that did more than just make people look twice and get you into the right club. As I began to earn a bit of money I tried to buy the type of suits that would carry you through a working day and then, hopefully, with some slight adjustments, take you into the evening as well. There existed a real shopping Mecca for the cash-light, style-heavy shopper back then, a place called Hyper Hyper which I used to frequent. It was a kind of deranged Top Shop where individual stallholders rented space to sell all kinds of weird clothing: garments that looked like a bunch of underpants sewn together, or giant zoot suits with big chains, or outlandish pirate hats, or clothes that looked like they belonged in Doctor Who , or decorators’ boiler-suits sprayed in alarming colours, all of which were mainly nightclub wear. I loved Hyper Hyper, but across the road, among the funky stores of the marginally more sedate Kensington Market, a store called Rock a Cha specialized in really quite cheap but very well-made slim-fit 1950s suits. They were the business.

  Another favourite was Johnson’s, at the end of the King’s Road, just before the Vivienne Westwood store that occupied the site of the infamous Seditionaries, formerly Sex. I don’t know what is there now – possibly a shop selling upmarket ha
ir products or an employment agency for Filipino nannies – no doubt something rather soulless compared to the fabulous Johnson’s.

  It had been set up and was run by its namesake, a cool cat called Lloyd Johnson, and it was a real magnet for people who were into fashion, but into fashion in a peculiar way. People who were into fashion without being fashionable. They liked clothes but they didn’t want to wear what was dictated to them by magazines. So Lloyd always kept in stock drape jackets, baggy rockabilly-style shirts, tight jeans and ludicrously voluminous jeans, and bizarre shoes. His rails bulged, especially downstairs where the older stock went. I don’t remember him ever having a proper sale. Instead the old stuff got squeezed on to the already overcrowded rails at the back of the basement, until people started buying those sorts of shirts or jeans again. I first bought clothes from him in about 1979, just as punk began to fizzle out. I remember going to a party kitted out in a Johnson’s jacket patterned with huge black and white diamonds, big, baggy, ill-fitting jeans that didn’t do a lot for me and shoes that looked as though someone had taken a ruler to them, divided them into quarters and painted each section in alternating black and white, which, with my enormous feet, was a ridiculous sight. If only I’d had that Vivienne Westwood hat back then I could have skipped going home and gone straight to the Big Top, where I like to think I would have married the tattooed lady and lived happily ever after, with the patter of tiny feet echoing about our caravan. That’s if we shared with the dwarfs, of course.

  Undaunted, over the years I bought any number of things from Lloyd, including a leather jacket festooned with chains, which I still have in my cupboard and which I once wore when pretending to be a Tom Jones backing singer. I also bought a number of fantastic crushed-velvet suits in a variety of garish colours, which, I very, very strongly suspect, I would not squeeze into now. The trousers had a fairly unforgiving 32-inch waist but the fabric was brilliant – a lush, shiny material that really caught and reflected the light and looked great in the studio. I did a whole series, called Mondo Rosso , for BBC2 in those suits.

  The programme wasn’t seen by too many people, but was one of those shows that was thoroughly enjoyed by all who did watch it, and by me. It was one of the best experiences of making a TV show I’ve had because the end result was exactly what I wanted it to be. And wearing flashy, trashy, sleazy clothes from Johnson’s was part of that. The shop closed down, unfortunately, with very little fanfare, towards the end of the 1990s. At that time Las Vegas was reinventing itself as a place where younger people could go and waste their money, and I believe Lloyd rode the crest of that wave and went out there for a while to sell his louche rockabilly bowling shirts. Wherever he is now, I hope he realizes how fondly he is remembered by everyone who passed through the door of his King’s Road emporium.

  Contrary to the normal pattern, I’ve grown to prefer louder and trashier and weirder-looking outfits more as I’ve got older, rather than less. When I first started on TV I just wanted to look smart and maybe a bit cool. Modern European designers were becoming popular in the UK, the likes of Gaultier, Armani and Versace (back then Dolce had only just met Gabbana and Viktor and Rolf were still in short trousers).

  When I saw magazine photos of Jean Paul Gaultier’s huge suits, with their big, sloping but baggy shoulders and low-cut collars, it was love at first sight. I thought they looked great, but I couldn’t possibly afford them. Even in the mid-1980s they were £500 or £600 each. That’s a lot for a suit even today, but back then seemed almost surreal. It was like having the choice of a new flat or a new suit and settling on the suit.

  If you couldn’t stretch to that – and no one I knew could – there was a larger-than-life character who had come down to London from the North to set up shop as a tailor, and who, for a small consideration, would meet you outside one of the bijou stores that sold these very expensive suits, like Bazaar on South Molton Street, which was a particular favourite of mine that I would drop into occasionally to check out the clothes and marvel at the prices. You’d go into the shop and, while you distracted the sales guy by discussing with him whether or not you were minded to purchase the Jean Paul Gaultier medieval-style sackcloth doublet, or perhaps the all-in-one catsuit with cape attached, my tailor friend would quickly sketch the suit you really hankered after and make you a knock-off for about seventy-five quid.

  I still desperately wanted to get my hands on a gen-u-ine Gaultier. When I got the chance of hosting my own show for Channel 4, it was all I needed to throw caution to the winds. For the pilot of The Last Resort , I blew the entire wardrobe budget, plus every last penny of the presenting fee I’d allocated myself, on three expensive suits. It wasn’t actually as much as it sounds – the clothes budget was three or four hundred pounds and my fee was probably only five hundred, if that – but it all went on the purchase, in the sales, of two Alfredo Dominguez suits from a store called Woodhouse, and, finally, my very first Jean Paul Gaultier from Bazaar, accessorized with a vintage hand-painted silk tie I got from Paul Smith. Oh, what a joy it was to wear! I never felt as good wearing anything else as I did in that suit.

  After that I always made a big effort to get hold of suits I liked and wanted to wear. The confidence I gained from looking good, at least in my own eyes, made up for the nerves I felt going out and presenting a live TV show with next-to-no experience and very little material to call upon. That was the start of my love affair with the slightly more eclectic fringe of modern menswear.

  I have strayed once or twice, and even tried designing a few of my own. That’s an easy trap to fall into. After you’ve bought a few suits from all the more way-out designers, you begin to think this suit-designing lark can’t be that difficult. It’s just a matter of tinkering with the size of the lapel and deciding where to put the pockets and buttons. Next thing you know you’re sitting with a tailor working on your very own bespoke masterpieces. In my case, that idea was prompted as much by becoming friends with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as anything else. I’d noticed that Jools Holland always wore suits of a unique style and cut, but it was only when I started hanging out with Vic and Bob that I realized you really didn’t need to worry about what other people were wearing, you could incorporate any features you liked into a bespoke suit. You could say, ‘I once saw a collar on a jacket worn by Patrick McGoohan in a film made in 1962 and I’d like you to copy that for me, please.’ So I happily jumped on that bandwagon for a while, having suits made with flared sleeves and buttons on the trouser turn-ups and different-coloured lapels. I had a light-blue one, for example, with a black-velvet trim on the collar. I can see now that it made me look like a ticket collector, but at the time I thought it was pretty damn swish.

  That style of suit never really worked for me anyway – it always looked a lot better on Vic, partly because he dyed his hair black and fashioned it into a quiff and partly because, frankly, back then he was a far more handsome man than I was. Now, of course, I am the better-looking one and he is grotesque, but at the time he was a very attractive young television newcomer and he carried off a suit possibly with greater aplomb than anyone before or since.

  The other downside to bespoke suits is that it’s just so boring getting them made. All the measuring and fitting and going back time and again for another fitting, then another fitting, then another bloody fitting. Aaaargh! All to wind up with a suit that won’t be anywhere near as nice as one you can buy off the shelf from a proper designer.

  It’s a lot like getting your hair cut and styled. If you go in with too high an expectation of what can be accomplished then you are bound to be let down. You are, in the words of Elvis Presley in the marvellous movie Roustabout , ‘cruisin’ for a bruisin’’. Many is the time I’ve gone for a trim, walking in looking just the way I do and imagining that, in the hands of the right hair artiste, I will emerge looking like that cross between George Clooney and mid-period David Bowie that I feel more than capable of pulling off. Imagine my disappointment when I come out looking like mysel
f, with shorter hair. I did once have a haircut so terrifically unflattering that I locked myself in the bedroom of the hotel we were staying in at the time and told Jane, through the door, that I was either going to wait until it grew back or throw myself off the balcony. In the end I calmed down and we agreed not to talk about it, but I was mistaken for Curly from Coronation Street at least three times in the following weeks.

  My attempts to get the perfect suit made for me have never quite panned out as hoped. The biggest error of judgement came when I decided I would start dressing like the young Cary Grant. I fancied myself heading towards middle age with a whole new and altogether more appropriate look, perhaps classically fashionable in a timeless way. So I went to another reasonably well-known young tailor, then based in Soho and equally at home in the company of wealthy young posh types from Chelsea and the local ladies who offered intimacy for cash – brasses, he called them. I showed him a picture of Cary Grant in just the sort of immaculate suit I was hoping for – a one-buttoned jacket, with that slightly drapey style to it that they had in the 1940s. Nothing too extreme: broad shoulders, longish but quite thick lapels, pegged trousers, but not too narrow nor too wide at the bottom.

  ‘This is the suit for me,’ I said. ‘I am positive this is the suit that will make me look fabulous. If it does, I’ll probably wear nothing but this style for the next ten or twenty years. So let’s keep it simple, keep it plain. Let’s get it right.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. ‘But do you fancy trying it in velvet?’