Age used to dictate how men dressed. Now, we live in a world of middle youth, where anyone is supposed to be able to wear whatever they like. I operate on the principle that it's led to nothing other than sartorial disaster, from the late thirtysomething I saw in Brighton rocking the full Pete Doherty – unaware the louche bohemianism he was trying to convey via his rakish trilby and skintight jeans was undercut by the fact that he was also wearing a small baby in a Mamas & Papas papoose – to Richard Hammond, with his terrible hair and bootcut jeans and dreadful little necklace. He's not dressing like that in some kind of knowing, ironic way, like a 20-year-old Shoreditch-ite with a mullet and a tache. He doesn't think he looks like an unbelievable tit; he thinks that's how young people dress.
Yet designers keep foisting ever younger clothes on men. First there were fitted shorts – which I thought I'd seen the back of when I left junior school. Now there's mittens, something I thought I'd seen the back of around the time I learned to cut up my own food. I loudly remarked to this effect when I modelled them – they weren't just infantilising, they were impractical – before handing them back with a flourish of disdain. Then I went outside, where it was freezing, and they didn't seem impractical at all. Nor did they seem that infantilising, at least compared with the sight of a grown man crying like a toddler because his hands were too cold. What price my principles now?
• Alexis wears mittens £10, by Topman.
Knit £100, by Farah, from Urban Outfitters.
Shoes £285, by Russell & Bromley.
Jeans Alexis's own.
Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian. Grooming: Jason Crozier using Yonka for Men.
