Trail Blazer

Anyone who has a penchant for clichés (and I hardly try to avoid them like the plague) will love the one about teaching an old dog new tricks. I just love the image of a withered old German Shepherd sat in a quarantined, security operated lock up for the canine elderly wearing tweed patches and learning how to operate an iPhone, as if age will have quashed what little is left of its hand-eye coordination. Surely the lack of opposable thumbs will see to that. The crux of the matter is that there is nothing new anymore that hasn’t been recycled from all the old crap that old dogs used to bang on about. Because before our old dogs were sat in a canine state of comatose daytime drudgery, they were using quills and ink spots to dot the letter I, communicating through string lined tin cups and using the postal service to tell people things that were actually worth telling people. No use for an iPhone in the 1940s, unless you needed a door wedge for your air raid shelter.

According to Harvey Nichols’ new Spring Summer menswear collection, stack-jawed socialites the country over will be hitting the beach, the club and the sports hall in the most traditional of attire: the humble, smart and particularly effortless blazer. This is far from a new trick: blazers have hung from the shoulders of everyone from Abe Lincoln to Lionel Ritchie, from marketing execs to t-shirt combos on Primani students. It’s certainly a proud day for all those old dogs who will notice - as they tune in their wireless into a remix of the theme tune from Housewife’s Choice - that things, particularly in fashion, haven’t moved on that much at all.

If a guy really wants to look smart, then you can’t go wrong with a blazer. It may scream of a slightly arrogant public schoolboy, a relic of the classroom that outlived even the chalk board, but there is no denying that even the most snotty of vagabonds will look a million times better in a suit, even if it is just half of one. Justin Timberlake went from a prepubescent Mickey Mouse dweebo to the king of cool when he stole Michael Jackson’s dance moves (mostly performed in a blazer, I might add, only with more sequins) and modified the trend with converse and stubble. Sinatra held his over his shoulder, while many have tried to replicate the way that President Bartlet in The West Wing threw his on in one swift motion, less of a simple pull over and more of a poetic moment of cocksure showboating.

The new Harvey Nichols blazer showcase ranges from Paul Smith to D&G and incorporates the sort of bygone tailoring plucked from a different age, when men dressed smart for not just their wedding day, but also the beach and the football match. This season, lads, the old dogs really do know best.