What is it about men with inside jobs wanting to dress like men with outside jobs? I mean, I get the impulse to tear yourself away from a screen and grow flowers on the coast of Dungeness – or, I don’t know, force your shoulders so deep into the soil that you’re subsumed into total darkness – but I’m not sure I want those desires to be telegraphed on my everyday clothing: Birkenstocks, Carhartt chore jackets etc.
There’s nothing wrong with how, say, landscapers and horticulturalists dress – Derek Jarman was one of the best-dressed men in the world – but the gap between who we are and who we want to be perceived as shouldn’t be so easily legible when you’re nine-to-five-ing. Your clothes shouldn’t scream, “I’m anxious about modern life!” Perhaps we should all just dress like Elon Musk to show how completely fine we are with the techno-ordinariness of the world we’ve built.
While the Birkenstock Bostons were just about permissible in this apparent yearning for a soft(er) life – they’re suede, and therefore unsuitable for real, al fresco labour – then along came the Plasticana Gardana: a bird-pooey gardening clog made of hemp that had a brief moment of popularity in the 2010s in Japan and Sweden, before appearing on Bode’s autumn/winter 2020 catwalk, becoming an anti-It shoe in Brooklyn, getting covered extensively in New York’s fashion magazines, and now spreading into London.
Just this week I watched a 20-something TikToker with bleached hair and a scarf tied around his head go on a LimeBike pilgrimage for what he called “French gardening clogs” all the way from New Cross (where else?) to a shop on Columbia Road (again, where else?) that sells mostly beeswax candles, only to discover there’s a months-long waiting list because people “just won’t stop asking about them!” “F***,” he said, turning into a deli for a vegetarian curry. “I’ll have to pre-order them online.”
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