In menswear, beige sometimes doesn't seem a colour so much as a camouflage. Once you get past your mid-30s, you start to notice how many of the clothes on offer to you are beige – or its spiritual brothers taupe and mushroom. That is partly because designers assume that men get less adventurous with colour choices as they get older. But it also seems to have something to do with suggesting men approaching middle-age blend into the background, presumably in the hope that people won't notice your Methuselah-like decrepitude.
Of all the please-ignore-me shades, beige has the naffest reputation – beige is the colour of slacks, and the socks men wear with sandals; it's the colour of depressing tearooms in the kind of depressing English tourist attraction you never knew existed before you had children. So there's something appealingly perverse about designers trying to turn it into a statement of something other than nothing to see here, please move along, by encouraging men to clad themselves entirely in it. One manifestation of all-over beige is – brace yourselves – the safari suit with short shorts, ideal for anyone who looks at their wardrobe and sighs: oh, if only there was something in here that made me look like Sid James in Carry On Up The Jungle. It's a look that certainly doesn't say, "Please ignore me" – it says, "Phwoooar! Nyah-ha-HA-HA!" – but I preferred the clothes the stylist came up with: whether it's a wearable look is a moot point, but at least it didn't look, as you might expect, as if you'd wallpapered yourself.
• Alexis wears jumper from a selection, by DSquared2. Trousers £185, by Edun. Boots £71, by Dr Martens.
Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian. Grooming: Nikki Palmer at Mandy Coakley
