Polo shirts are the sign of a lazy man - so just don't do it

It's funny when there's a trend bubbling under that doesn't touch you at all. Polo shirts is one of them; apparently, the average British male (who he?) owns ten of them and sales in John Lewis have gone up 40 per cent every year since records began. Really? I don't actually know any men, directly, that wear them. And steady yourselves, because I know a lot of men; you do when you're as sweet and charming as I am and can bake good cakes. I did know someone who wore them; he once asked me if it was acceptable to do the top button up (no, it is not). But he and my friend got divorced and I did rather better out of the split 'cos I got to keep her, so I've no idea if he still wears them.

Polo dresses? Now they are cute - if worn by young girls up to about the age of 18. But polo shirts leave me cold. I think this is in large part due to the polo shirt being a great pretender. It fancies itself better than a T-shirt and can get round various "dress rules" (you can't wear a T-shirt on many golf courses, for instance, but a polo shirt is not only acceptable but practically uniform). Yet it's not as dressy, nor does it require as much commitment, as a shirt, so it's really a lazy man's approach to trying to dress "well". The polo shirt is also the absolute bedrock, along with its hideous bedfellow, chinos, of the "smart casual" wardrobe: a heinous dress code visited upon men by Mother Nature to make up for the fact that they don't have to have periods.

Here are its crimes. One: the collar on a polo shirt is all floppy. This isn't the worst sartorial crime, because you can get perfectly nice shirts with soft collars; but there's something particularly anaemic about a polo shirt collar. If you play tennis, or even polo, and wear Lacoste or Ralph Lauren or Fred Perry, then they look a posto, but otherwise, really, what is the point? I mean, I know the point. I know the polo shirt's collar is unstarched, ergo more comfy for people playing sport. But if you're not, why wear it?

Two: in every school I know, polo shirts are now standard PE uniform, thus starting a whole generation on this sort of junk-sartorial diet and making them think it's OK to wear such half-hearted apparel. What happened to those fantastic Aertex shirts? They had to be ironed; they needed commitment and a bit of sweat to get them looking good. They were crisp, they worked: Aertex is much more breathable than cotton pique, which is - crime three - what polo shirts are made of. The holes in Aertex were bigger. It's simple physics or maths to work out that they're going to be more breathable than all that close-knit, horrible pique.

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