As we’ve established, dressing when you’re a dad should all be about mess management. But with Father’s Day approaching the question remains: how to do it and not look like you’ve dressed yourself under the influence of heavy mood stabilisers?
The seismic life change that happens post-baby has a ripple effect to your wardrobe and buying new clothes falls way down the list of priorities. So you end up schlepping around like a schlub in your oldest and most trustworthy clothes: for me, this included a black corduroy shirt that was both ripped and accidentally bleach dyed but was a I-don’t-need-to-think-about-it piece. Gareth Scourfield (stylist for Daniel Craig and Colin Firth, and contributing fashion editor to Esquire) stresses the importance of moving away from the wardrobe upon which you’ve always relied, to something different when you enter fatherhood. “It’s about making an effort and knowing when you have simply grown out of and grown apart from clothes you’ve been wearing since the year BC – before children,” he says. For this, you need a new agenda for how you dress: look at a handful of stylish celebrities – it’s clear that they all follow certain dad dressing rules.
The daddy of all well-dressed dads is David Beckham. Taking a look at late 90s throwback photos of the football star with baby Brooklyn, he kept his look clean and straightforward – it was a lesson in basics: white T-shirts, khaki cardigans, black shirts and sweatshirts. It’s a simple look he has recently re-embraced. Scourfield says that simplicity is key to successful dad dressing. “Keep your colour palette to, say, five key colours and work on adding texture, such as herringbone and hopsack.”
John Legend and Kanye West are two young fathers who have more or less followed this advice. West’s fashion sense during North West’s first year was noticeably more conservative than his post-Yeezy looks. Famous shots of the father-daughter pair – sleeping side by side and in the recording studio – saw Kanye going matchy-matchy with Nori, first in a grey top, then in a faded white T-shirt. Very Version 1.0 Beckham.
The role of the modern dad is eclectic and action-filled (by “action” of course, I mean “ability to sprint from one Frozen party to the next”), so your wardrobe has to reflect that. “Stick to the three Fs: fit, fabric and function,” says Scourfield. He suggests investing in slim-cut chinos in olive and navy from Uniqlo or Massimo Dutti and upgrading your trainers to a pair of white Stan Smiths. Another necessity is the dad cap: the sort of cotton textured, subtly embroidered snapback headgear that is multipurpose and allweather.
In general, don’t look at your wardrobe as separates – think of them working together to created a whole new look. Like your new role, Scourfield says, your style should be malleable. “Make it as flexible as possible.”
