Will there be a dose of skinny-jeans wearing octogenarians in forty years time?

Colm O'Regan has started wearing skinny jeans and he's here to tell you all about it. 

I don’t know quite how it happened. I was sailing close to the wind but now the wind sails close to me.

A couple of slim jeans have shrunk in the wash and are now bona fide skinny. We’re talking ‘ I’m a creative’ skinny, Youtube star skinny, “we are tremendously excited by the client-engagement around this and wanted to reach out” skinny.

I’ll eventually have to get sense and buy a pair of proper-legged jeans again. The ones that can do everything from a wake to a walk, from an art gallery to augering in the barley.

Or maybe I won’t. Even as we reach Peak Beard and hipster has become a term of abuse, there’s a good few greying-around-the-temples punters whose calves and thighs are traced out for all to see.

There is a lot of time devoted to what the young people are wearing – but what about the older people? Is there a fashion trend to follow for the over 38s? I assume the catwalk stuff – men strutting down angrily, cheekbones waving, wearing a cape, wellingtons and the inner tire tube of an old Opel Kadett – is for the youth. You do see older men in catalogues leaning casually on marinas or laughing with friends but over-all the fashion industry starts to leave us alone once we get baby-milky stains on our shoulders.

Are we gently led by the hand to the cordurouy and elasticated waists? Or do we bring the fashions we grew up with into old age. And as such maybe the clothes of some elderly are like a record of the past. Have a look at the ever-dwindling group of classic oul lads. The last few hundred of the brown suited, flat cap men who did everything by hand and used long-lost verbs on vegetables, work that has been replaced by machines. Snagging turnips, thinning carrots, melching cauliflowers or spooking sugar beet. The last two are fictitious but I’m sure they would have been done by hand if necessary. The kind of men who only took their ties off when pulling lambs. They didn’t have chiselled abs but by jazzzuzz they were bog-body ready.

Are their brown suits what they were wearing when they were in their prime and they never stopped?

As such will there be a dose of skinny-jeans wearing octogenarians in forty years time? And what kind of example is that to be setting? (Maybe we’ll wear skinny jeans all the way up to the age where the Public health Nurse tells us she’s not going call in any more unless we cop on and stop cutting off circulation.)

Maybe we’ll be sitting in comfortable chairs calling each other Bae and asking the nurse to turn up the volume on the internet so we can hear some of those lovely old Rihanna choons.

“That girl had a grand voice. She knew how to hold a tune. Unlike the noise you hear now. And look at her fine sensible clothing as well. Very presentable.”

And what will the young people be wearing then? Maybe they’ll be hanging around what’s left of the bog, vaping and stooking, being cool in brown suits and floral print dresses and grand cardigans. They’ll cringe at the state of the old folk with their ripped slacks and T-shirts that say “Waikiki Surfing Festival 1975.”

I hope they’ll call in and see us then. We’ll have so much offer, so many tales of how “of course it was all done by hand on Facebook in them days”.