It’s just as well that the Diarist is not an international style icon (readers are of course free to disagree), because it’s very hard to keep up with what’s considered fashionable for men these days. Even before that Paul Mescal front-page photo yesterday – for which some of us think the stylist should have claimed responsibility in a coded phonecall to the newsroom – I was wrestling with news that the king of Spain now sometimes wears short-legged suits with no socks underneath. This sort of thing would normally have passed me by.
But it was brought to my attention by a sartorially judgmental friend – we’ll call her “Sarah” – who sees him as a role model for the rest of us. “Drooling over the king of Spain’s style and finely turned ankle,” she posted on a group WhatsApp, under a photo of the monarch emerging from a car with a lengthy expanse of flesh visible between his sawn-off trousers and the top of his shoes. READ MORE Hose maketh the man – Frank McNally on a male sartorial dilemma True North – Tim Fanning on Thomas Gaffney, an Irish-Alaskan legislator ‘The last of the great classical physicists’ – Brian Maye on William Thomson, Lord Kelvin A city where peace comes dropping slow – Frank McNally on a visit to The Hague Felipe VI is without doubt a good-looking man.
Finely or otherwise, however, his ankles turned 56 in January (I happen to know they were twins, born very close together). And it used to be received wisdom that men of m.