Steve Braunias identifies a disturbing fashion trend

Street style outside the Etro show at Milan Fashion Week. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! They have reached critical mass this summer, whole squadrons of men in their 50s, their 60s, their 70s, their nearly deads, parading around New Zealand in extremely garish shirts.

Vibrant, shocking, WELL HELLO THERE! Short-sleeved shirts by day; garish, psychedelic, LET’S HAVE ANOTHER ROUND! Long-sleeved shirts in the cool of evening. You see them gathered in bars, you see them playing cards at camping grounds – you can’t fail to see them, their presence is like a full-page advertisement. It’s an Auckland thing, but not restricted to Auckland. There are very many of this breed up north, for instance in that enclave of awful media professionals in “the Nui”, aka Pāuanui; but I have also seen many taking over the streets of cities, small towns and beach settlements in both islands, these dads in dazzling dress.

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! It’s a Pākehā thing, but not restricted to Pākehā; some Māori, Chinese, Indian and other peoples of colour are also afflicted with this alarming statement, this bold response to old age. Their hair has gone grey. Their hair has gone white. Their hair has simply gone, and their heads shine like coins. But they do not go quietly into this good night of faded glory; they go very loudly, their shirts waving like mad flags, as red as beet, as yellow as the sun, as crazily patterned as the colour of their dreams. William Burroughs, describing what it was like to take the psychoactive drug yage in Peru, in 1953: “A wave of dizziness swept over me and the hut began spinning... I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door hitting my shoulder against the door post. I felt the shock but no pain... Larval beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one giving an obscene, mocking squawk – I later identified this squawking as the croaking of frogs.” The shirts of the old look like that.

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! It’s the latest thing, but it goes back a long way. My father got in early. It happened on one of his occasional visits to the family home. I was about 16 and followed him from room to room – I hadn’t seen him in years and was curious about this stranger moving around the house – until he found what he was looking for: a shirt. He had run out of shirts, he said, and would take a shirt left behind by one of my older brothers. It was psychedelic shirt in swirling purples and pinks. “Good fit!”, he announced. He was an old guy in a colourful shirt simply because he couldn’t afford a new shirt.

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! It’s the new black, except there is no black. Their garments are a hues corporation doing combat with the greyness of their corporeal existence. It’s a uniform. Where are they getting these things? Strange to think of a fashion buyer catching on to the trend, and ordering a range of extremely colourful shirts in department stores and menswear stores all across New Zealand. Their thoughts are occupied with finding deeper greens, sourcing more outrageous oranges – they are reading David Foster Wallace and nodding in agreement when he describes the ocean: “I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very, very bright blue.”

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! Wait a minute - I’m an old Pākehā living in Auckland. The shirts in my wardrobe are 50 shades of grey. “Join us,” chant the seniors in their twinkling tops, and I hear the call.

Old guys in extremely colourful shirts! Good on them. They’re harmless. They’re going about their business. They’re dying, and all they want to do is write their name on the sky with one final flourish, one last hurrah. Peace out to these ancients in their THE LIGHT GLEAMS AN INSTANT shirts, these venerables in their THE AIR IS FULL OF OUR CRIES costumes. It could be worse. Next summer, they might walk around with their shirts off.