Eva Bradley: Valid fashion criticism or age bias? It's a close shave

Eva Bradley

How do you know you are getting old? Some might say it's when you can't get into bed without a hot water bottle, and can't get out without a walking stick. Perhaps it's when the first grey hairs appear or even earlier when you can no longer call them laugh lines because they're actually proper wrinkles.

Another sure-fire indicator is that you hear yourself moaning out loud about the hairstyles of young people, which I happened to do earlier this week.

It goes without saying that the "Bieber" is universally hated by anyone old enough to vote, with the exception perhaps of shampoo executives who have had an unexpected windfall now that teenage boys have become as vain as their female contemporaries about maintaining their long locks.

But what of the designer stubble? A more recent arrival into the fashion field, it was until recently the preserve of the lazy, the drunk and the homeless. Now, regrettably, it has found a more populous home on the chins of otherwise upstanding young men. Men whose mothers taught them to clean their teeth before bedtime, and whose fathers leaned in front of the mirror with them at the onset of puberty and showed them how to go with the grain.

Shaving is an ancient ritual that has been passed from father to son in the same way hunting for mammoth once was. Aside from some dark moments in hirsute history (think President Abraham Lincoln and maybe John Lennon in the later years), a man's self-pride and personal grooming has hinged around a shave after breakfast.

But like so many respectable traditions, shaving has fallen foul of the 21st-century predilection towards scruff. Women spend hours in front of the mirror in a bid to achieve the perfectly imperfect "bed head", pyjama pants have become the outfit of choice at certain supermarket chains and expensive designer jeans come ready-ripped or pre-worn in case anyone presumed the wearer might - gasp - have overdressed.

I'm not advocating for a world where socks are pulled knee-high and top buttons are always done up but guys - a shave. Really. Is it so hard?

I understand the genesis for the latest trend. And I don't blame David Beckham and Brad Pitt. Honestly, I don't. If I were continually voted among the world's most attractive men year after year, I too might find my standards slipping a bit or even consider a deliberate drop in grooming standards if only to make it more fair for everyone else.

But regular guys? Joe Publics going about the daily grind in off-piste provincial New Zealand? Unfortunately what has failed to translate from GQ Magazine to the real world is that designer stubble without the Gucci glasses and Giorgio Armani suit is just stubble.

And while Sunday morning while mowing the lawn is entirely the right time and place to skip a shave, there are certain days in a man's life which - even if you are David Beckham - should start with a razor. As a wedding photographer who spends many painstaking hours digitally smoothing the skin of brides who have already spent hours in front of the mirror in order to look absolutely perfect, it is heartbreaking to see how many grooms now wait at the top of the aisle looking like they've rolled out of bed after a three-day bender on their stag do.

Or am I just showing my age? Do I just not "get it"? Am I no different from my grandmother who went to her grave still lamenting the fact her eldest daughter got married to a guy with longer hair than her and sideburns that looked like a uncontrolled gorse bush?