How to wear jeans

I’m not the sort of person who goes around advising people on what to wear. I actually prefer to look in disdain at bad outfits from a distance, or nudge an equally judgemental and shallow friend so we can enjoy it together. But now that summer is officially over and the farce of wearing shorts has been abandoned, I feel that the time has finally come for me to unleash my sartorial venom on the world.

Specifically, I have a problem with men in bootcut jeans. Bootcut jeans were originally designed to flatter the classic English pear-shaped figure. Men, let’s face it, should not need to balance out rounded, child-bearing hips with a slight flare on the lower leg. And if, by some evil trick of biology, you do find yourself with an overly curvaceous middle section, you should be spending less time in the sort of denim that only accentuates this problem and more time in a tracksuit trying to rectify it. Or at least shovelling cheeseburgers down your neck in a bid to cover it up with a little extra weight.

This is not, I promise, part of some ridiculous plot I have concocted to make the male line-up of your average bar resemble a photocall at the NME Awards. Whatever my preferences for drainpipes of Klaxon proportions, I recognise that there is something massively undignified about getting halfway to work and realising that you’re wearing your girlfriend’s jeans because they were indistinguishable from your own as they lay on the bedroom floor that morning. The golden rule here is, as I explained to one reader who actually wrote in to ask whether women found men in skinny jeans attractive, don’t make them too tight. A pair of good slim-fit dark jeans will always make you look super trendy in that slightly grubby nonchalant way that the Strokes do. I’d hazard a guess that theirs are something reassuringly expensive, like Dior Homme, but the People’s market version that I literally begged one of my male friends to buy, make a passable subsitution. And best of all, they aren’t tight enough to cause the Horror effect, ie, Faris Rotter spray-ons that only enhance a likeness to a skull on legs.

Baggy jeans, for so long the nemesis of the fashion-forward man, have also made a comeback. When wearing baggy jeans, please try to refrain from using Kurt Cobain as your model. Yes, he worked the look, but he was a musical genius and it was 1992. One modern man who knows how to do baggy is Marc Jacobs, whose loose-fit, dark-rinse denims are like a grown-up, classy version of what you probably wore to death during your moody teenage years. If you don’t know who or what Marc Jacobs is, go to Gap and buy some carpenter-fit jeans.

The final option is to try turn-ups. This can be difficult to pull off without looking like you’re appearing in a local production of West Side Story, but if you do, it looks super hot. The jeans need to be straight leg, slightly too long and indigo, but you literally just need to turn them up a couple of inches at the cuff and fix in the crease by ironing over it. If channelling James Dean seems a bit ambitious, there is an easily copied alternative that will give the same aesthetic. Simply reference the part in teen rom-com She’s All That when they are decorating the school for the prom and Paul Walker’s turn-ups and his turn-ups-and-tee combo momentarily transform his douchey jock into an arbiter of style and taste. Just don’t tell anyone where you got your new look.