We went to a barbecue last week at a posh, modern house. It was time to go so I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. I didn't think to change my faded shorts and my rolls of flab displaying t-shirt till Maggie appeared wearing a spotty dress. "Do I have to dress up?," I groaned. I did, so I did. A shirt with a collar and leather shoes. I even shaved.
We weren't out of place but I could have got away with the shorts, well maybe. Perhaps I would have needed to iron them first. Most people, even if they were in shorts, looked neat. I cultivate crumpled and scruffy. Like those 1980s Bacardi ads but without the firm flesh.
We went to see the opening speeches of the Pinoso Fiestas on Thursday. Maggie commented that lots of the women in the audience were very smartly dressed. It was then that I realised then that I have a view on dress codes in Spain.
The only place where it seems, for everyday people, to be essential to dress up is for a wedding and probably for a communion. Women at weddings wear unusually smart clothes; red carpet stuff. Men, on the other hand, wear badly fitting suits dragged out of a genteel semi retirement. The men look uncomfortable. Funerals are different. There seems to be no need to smarten up for a funeral and I'm often a bit taken aback by the casualness of funeral wear. In fact there seems to be no need to smarten up for work, for the theatre or for the opera. This doesn't mean that Spain is scruffy it simply means that people dress as they think appropriate. Most of the time there is no imposition of a dress code or even a particular expectation. Not always of course. I worked somewhere that had a (very light touch) dress code and I saw a restaurant website the other day that said that the dress style was "formal" though I'm sure they meant neither black nor white tie. The flip side of this is that if you go out wearing a traditional cape, a dinner jacket, a lounge suit or a scarf when it's 25ºC then nobody will give you a second glance.
I'm probably wrong. My wardrobe choice has been greatly reduced by the unfathomable shrinkage of many of my clothes over the years so I may be seeking justification for my own slovenliness. And I do still try to adapt, a little, to the situation by choosing black jeans, faded blue jeans or my Cliff Richard jeans. The last because my mum always reckoned that Cliff was so clean cut he pressed a crease into his jeans. It's true that some jeans are smarter than others.
The few times I've been to a classy restaurant in the evening I usually wear beige chinos and a short sleeved, checked, button down collar shirt. If there are other grey haired British men there they will be wearing exactly the same basic outfit. We Britons are well trained.
