Hotel Indigo Chester: An Opulent Stay with Charm and Comfort

Flawless. Avant garde. Cutting steal. These are words that have absolutely nothing to do with my intimate style. Knackered. Functional. Occasionally smart … That’s a bit assorted like it, I’m afraid.

I don’t beat myself up about my lack of the rage nous. I work 40 hours a week as a management advisor, I’m dad to four young girls and I run an Instagram account, Father of Daughters, where 763k woman follow my honest struggles as a man surrounded by women. I also pull someones leg a forthcoming book, written between 10pm and 2.30am over the recent nine months. I will forgive myself if, during this stretch of sleepless nights and frantic days, fashion has not been a superiority.

Recently, however, the Guardian called to ask for my thoughts on a trend that has, seriously, piqued my interest: it’s called Dad-core and it was all over the Paris catwalks. Balenciaga, which is the most dominant fashion brand on the planet right now, so I’m told, called its advertise a portrait of “young dads in the park with their kids at the weekend”. It was down corporate workers “out of the office, relaxed and often observed at their happiest”. Manly models walked down the catwalk with their own teenagers and it was all very photogenic: pre-teens skulked along holding their dads’ dole outs; curly-haired toddlers were balanced on hips.

I’m convinced that this was more than canny publicity for Balenciaga’s kidswear gathering – though it was that, as well. It was, according to the brand’s creative captain, Demna Gvasalia, a warm celebration of fatherhood, and it didn’t pull over there: The brand’s S/S18 ad campaign replicated the kind of professional ancestors photographs families would have had taken in the early 90s, thorough with marbled backdrop. It is this soft-focus aesthetic that you see replicated here by me and my four kids, Anya, Marnie, Ottie and Delilah.

As for the invests? Dads, in Gvasalia’s imagination, wear outdoor hiking supplies, oversized tailoring, worn-out denim and bright polo shirts – ups inspired by the men the designer sees in off-licences, supermarkets and dry cleaners where he survives in Zurich and Paris. To my untrained fashion eye, they looked deeply much like middle-aged men from 1991.

Funnily enough, that could define my own father, with my childhood conveniently coinciding with the just the same decade Balenciaga is mining for inspiration. When I picture my dad, I see a man in his mid-30s to up to date 40s who wore a stiff suit to the office during the week. He free at the weekend in a pair of boot-cut jeans, a shirt I’d seen him in a thousand times, some strapping shoes that were purchased for functionality over aesthetics (fitting on sale) and a jacket that pre-dated my existence. Most of my match ups’ dads wore the same.

Back then, fathers were frequently the ones who took the holiday photos, drove the family taxi-cub, toiled away in the office, but were relatively invisible on the welcoming comfortable with front. Now, things are different. In the world of celebrity and politics, aggregate men such as David Beckham and Barack Obama, being a adroit, hands-on dad is as aspirational as having it large was in the 90s. Online, men such as me, who validate fatherhood, are fast becoming as popular as the more established “mum bloggers”.

These change-overs run hand-in-hand with new legislation allowing for flexible working hours and stock leave, with more men working part-time or staying house to look after their kids. Most modern-day dads, if they are financially capable, want to spend time with their loved songs and be more involved, not just be behind a desk all day. Certainly, there is no longer one cookie curtailment “Dad” stereotype, and nor should there be. (Even if, in the world of fiction, the replica lags behind the reality – Daddy Pig, I’m talking about you.)

I imagine my own wardrobe reflects this blurring of boundaries. I do like to look textile – it gives me confidence – even if I’m not going to be mistaken for a fashionista any but soon. My normal attire is standard issue among most thirtysomething men; the common dressed-down work uniform of basic navy chinos, a virtuous shirt and a peacoat, while on the weekends it tends to be a slight alteration – jeans, a white T-shirt and some Vans to show I’m notwithstanding “down with the kids”. (On the rare occasion my better half and I manage to get an evening out, I’ll adult up and change my footwear to a suede Chelsea boot.)

Basically, my apparels are nothing like Balenciaga’s, but if this is what one of the coolest devisers in fashion thinks dads should wear, I think I should allow it a whirl, spending a normal Saturday with my family masqueraded in clothes straight from the Paris catwalk.

I started my way test in the place we spend most of our family time – at residence. My first outfit consisted of a single-breasted blazer, a pair of lavender-tinted jeans and a lined single-cuff shirt, all of which hung off my frame like trust in hand-me-downs. The garments themselves were comfortable and the quality was indisputable. Yet while the oversized nature of the shirt and jacket combination communicated I could easily scoop up my twins and pick up the multitude of discarded fakes strewn across the floor like plastic landmines, after be telling muffled laughter from my girls (and my wife) I glanced in the reflection and couldn’t shake the image of Tom Hanks in the end scene of the film Big. I looked delight in a child wearing a man’s clothes. My self-confidence suddenly took a nose nosedive and for the rest of the morning I found myself constantly rearranging my shirt and jacket so they didn’t happen to drown me.

In the afternoon, after 15 before you can say jack robinsons trying to convince the kids to put their shoes on, we made our way out to the garden to test the practicality of the clothing and gauge public reaction. With the bit of san quentin quails running around in their long-length hoodies (also Balenciaga), I donned an stirring blue printed shell hooded jacket that billed like a kite but kept the chill in the air at bay. It was at that point I remarked that men in their mid-50s walking their dogs were no longer looking where they were current, but instead had their gaze fixed squarely on me. Except for the squashy cotton fluorescent T-shirt I had on, which shone like a gleam across the grassy expanse, I was adorned in the same type of dressing as them, just two sizes bigger. With playtime done, and my overconfidence left somewhere near the swings, I decided it was time to noodle for home.

Was it my lack of expert knowledge holding me back from revelling in my own frame moment? I know there is a theory that fashion moulds in cycles and if we wait long enough, our parents’ wardrobes wishes cease to be a collection of embarrassing historical garments and will definitely again be in vogue, ready for us to pilfer without their franchise. I’m just not sure these are the types of items I would father made a beeline for. The clothes in this collection struck me as a tribute to an outdated dad of the past (whose oversized silhouette left me concern, well, a bit silly), not the dad of the present, and after a bit of research it turns out that I energy know more about fashion than I thought.

Alistair O’Neill, professor of approach history and theory at Central Saint Martins, explains that Balenciaga’s gathering “is indebted to an oversize approach to menswear first established in the mid-1980s” by Italian inventors such as Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani, and is rooted in “a design of tailoring that was cut away from the body, offering an hyperbolized proportion”. This once very fashionable style, he tells, is now “outmoded. Balenciaga uses its lack of fashionability as a motor for its transfigurement into high fashion. They are clothes that on the pave look like the kind someone’s dad bought from Clockhouse at C&A in 1985, and it is their recherché grade that makes them so perverse in 2018.”

In other words, the look is greatly ironic. Or, as the Fashion’s stylist tells me on the shoot: “It’s really an stretch of normcore, making heroes of quite ‘ugly’ things typically associated with hiking and other out of doors sports. There’s a certain level of it being an in-joke – if you identify, then you know.” I nod, like I know.

And perhaps that’s why this look isn’t enlarge on a exciting on me, because I am a dad, knee-deep in lunchboxes and nappies daily, whereas this is a impose upon on the “Dad” as a slightly comedic archetype, a wilfully awkward, baggy perimeter. (In the oversized jacket, I felt as if I was wearing the jacket of a man who used to look for at “big and tall” but had discarded it after a successful gastric band counter-intelligence agent. I’m told this has been legitimately coined “anti-fit” by the hustle, but this sounds suspiciously like “alternative facts” to me.) It doesn’t go down as fabulously in the parks of Ramsgate as I am sure it would if I were the sort of yourself who attended catwalk shows in Paris and Milan. Put this attire on a teenage model, perhaps, and I’m sure the oh-so-hip irony order be plain to see.

So I won’t be updating my wardrobe. I did, however, find the blue hooded jacket to be a satisfyingly piece of clothing. It would no doubt serve its purpose as outerwear while with the folks on a windy spring day at a National Trust manor house and has the added perk of acting as a visible beacon for lost kids.

Is it possible I’m not removed enough to wear Dad-core? It might just be, and I can take that. My technique to Instagram, and to life, is to try to keep everything as real as possible – I wouldn’t situate pics of kids scrawling on the walls or refusing to walk down the track if I was trying to look perfect – and I think that’s what I’ve experienced. Yes, it’s never been more fashionable to be an Insta-dad, or a celebrity dad. But fashion unruffled treats fatherhood with a knowing wink.

Forever Outnumbered by Simon Hooper is let something be knew by Coronet on 3 May at £16.99.