As the seasons change, fashion disappears. The SS15 collections have been in store for about three months now, and savvy men are not shopping. Fashion obsessives cherry-picked as soon as the clothes hit the rails, while the cautious know the summer sales are just round the corner. Online stores are already emailing promotional codes offering 20 per cent off, hoping to nudge customers into a late-season purchase before full markdowns begin.
It’s strange that a time of genuine seasonal change should be so redundant in luxury retail. Such are the vagaries of an outmoded seasonal system that sees coats delivered to stores in June and T-shirts in January. Familiarity with the same advertising messages that have been in magazines and online since January means that, until the AW15 deliveries begin arriving in around six weeks, men’s fashion fades from view.
Yet what replaces fashion is fashion. Not the diktats of what an industry hopes its customers might buy but the already-owned garments we put on each morning. Indeed, to study the temperature of male dressing this April 2015, the alarm clock needs to be set early. It was sunny at 7.45am on Monday in London, and warmth had been forecast for later, but the air was still cold. A neighbour was strapping his child into the bike seat for a trip to nursery. To do so, he was wearing a cropped navy coat. I went back inside, and put on another layer.