Harry Pearson
Cricket is often praised as an elegant game, but it’s fair to say that not since the days of Asif Iqbal and his billowing flares has the game produced any player who could remotely be described as a fashion leader.
These days cricketers do their best to look hip and modern with their shades, baseball caps and tracksuits, but the effect is altogether more Jimmy Savile than Puff Daddy. It is a brave effort but the players are swimming against a sartorial tidal wave. Because, let’s face it, how cool can you be when your job requires you to wear white nylon slacks? If Blue Note had made similar demands of their musicians even Miles Davis would have looked like a dork.
Beyond the boundary it is another matter entirely, of course. Lord’s may not have Royal Ascot’s hats but it has something just as impressive in its own way, the MCC membership, a body which is to style what Fred Trueman is to futurism. Every morning at nine the Grace Gates swing open to a rolling mass of strident striped blazers, cerise corduroys and panama hats which look like they have been winter home to a herd of hibernating hedgehogs. Anyone who regards fashion as the repressive construct of a metropolitan elite should worship these people as gods.
From a glance around the Lord’s museum it is clear the MCC’s aims are twofold: cricket matches and waging an all-out terror campaign against the running dogs of haute couture.
It all began with the colours. There are two explanations behind the MCC’s choice (well, three if you include the rather dull one about the Star & Garter club). One is that the person who came up with them was colour blind; the other that he or she was a wicked prankster.
Personally I lean towards the latter theory. I imagine the joker experimenting with fabrics for years until the perfectly clashing shades of cherry and custard had been produced, then stitching together a tie, holding the finished product aloft and maliciously chuckling: “Now let’s see them find an outfit that will match this vile little bugger!”
Impossible, naturally, but such is the anti-fashion verve of the MCC’s membership that most don’t even bother to attempt it, opting instead to fling it together with the first thing that comes to hand. A pale blue sleeveless safari suit, perhaps, or a Tattersall check shirt buttoned incorrectly (and this is the sort of little detail that transforms an outfit from one that simply affronts the fashionistas to one that slaps them round the chops with a sand-filled sock) so that one half of the collar curls like a stale sandwich.
Or they might plump for a mint-green v- necked pullover displaying evidence of past gastronomic indulgence. Just as scientists can uncover ancient weather patterns by studying the rings of fossilised trees, so future archaeologists will be able to determine trends in middle-class dining habits by carefully scraping away the layers on an MCC member’s jumper.
Not, I should say, that the jumper is the product of slovenliness. Far from it. The garment serves an important purpose. The member knows that if ever food supplies run low he has simply to immerse his sweater in boiling water to produce a nutritious broth. It is not so much a pullover as knitted cup-a-soup (quite often complete with crunchy croutons).
Under threat from the ever growing tyranny of style (many members have now abandoned baggy-crotched, straw-coloured corduroy trousers in favour of Blairite chinos) the MCC is now flaunting its colours like never before.
The Lord’s catalogue offers everything from button-down plaid shirts to boxer shorts in the characteristic septic-boil combo of yellow and red. There is a whole page of pyjamas and nightshirts. A little superfluous, perhaps, since it is clear from their rumpled appearance that most members sleep fully clothed.
There is also a celebration of the heroic resistance in the museum. In one section on the first floor a little picnic tableau has been arranged. On the floor a rug is covered with a lavish picnic. Beside it on a fold-out chair sits a perfect waxwork of an elderly, moustachioed MCC member apparently in the act of falling asleep while munching a chicken drumstick.
Well, at least I assume it was a waxwork.