Full-sleeved plaid shirts

There’s this guy I used to work with. He wore plaid full-sleeved shirts, chinos and white keds. Every day. I worked with him for two years and the whole time I never saw him wear anything but plaid full-sleeved shirts, chinos and white keds. How about that? And he was an art director. A good one, at that. He directed fashion shoots, meticulously planning wardrobes for models to portray aspirational lifestyles to sell stereos, cars and herbal remedies.

At the time, I didn’t give it much thought. There were hundreds like him, after all. Nearly every guy you saw coming out of an office building those days in Bangalore wore plaid shirts and chinos. Maybe he doesn’t give a fuck. Or maybe he’s just trying to look normal when everyone around him is… choose your own phrase a) trying break out of the mould b) march to their own beat c) not be one among the herd.

It took me nearly seven years to realize this, but that guy was one of the coolest people I’ve ever known. Because his deliberate lack of style was his style. His startling ordinariness was unpretentious, not self-conscious, rebellious and utterly, simply cool.

I came to this realization as I was pouring through some brochures for some new real estate. You know, the kind that has artist’s impressions of the buildings with little red and blue cars drawn into the parking bays. For good measure, they also throw in some drawings of people walking around. And one of the men sketched by the artist was the spitting image of my old friend, the plaid shirt guy.

So I got thinking. Is ordinariness that bad that everyone has to veer away from it? Sure, it’s boring and it brings to mind images of that Amish family in Witness. But is that such a bad thing? Now I don’t really know too much of the Amish and their exact code, but I’ll tell you something, given a choice between waking up at 4 to feed the cows and waking up at 9 to think of the next engaging ‘big idea’ for a brand of consumer durables (ideally something that my peers in the industry wish they’d thought of), I’d set the alarm for 4 any day. Not that I particularly like cows. They’re the dumbest looking things I’ve ever seen, after chickens. What on earth do you need four stomachs for?

But, of late, I find myself thinking about the Amish way a lot.

I work deep in the cosy recesses of consumer culture. In fact, as I write this on my MacBook Pro, there are 7 files for various clients in various stages of completion cluttering my desktop. There’s a Wallpaper magazine on my table which showcases some of the coolest, best designed objects in the world. Me and the other subscribers to Wallpaper no doubt get a kick out of the fact that we, this brotherhood of aesthetes, have taste. We probably watch Fellini movies, own Smeg fridges and covet Bang & Olufsen radios. If we use a computer, it’ll never be something as common and ugly as a PC. Shudder shudder.

Cool has so many layers of meaning. But cool is an opinion, not fact. And it is my considered opinion that cool stands for not giving a fuck. It’s about rebellion, not being self-conscious, pretentious. Going by that definition, the Amish are cool. Way cooler than that designer on the cover of Wallpaper. Than skanks who carry small dogs and wear oversized sunglasses. Way cooler than Elbow or Bat For Lashes or whoever has the number one video on the MTV charts today.

Now even if I were to wake up at 4 tomorrow I don’t have any cows to milk. And sadly, there are no Amish settlements in the NCR region. So I’m going to do the next best thing, I’m going to buy a full-sleeved plaid shirt.