“Dad Dressing” is a misnomer. Dads don’t consciously dress, they just put stuff on. The cold hard facts of the matter are: there is no zhushing up the state of panic that is picking scraps of plaid from the floor in the darkness of a 5am bottle feed. Having previously seen yourself as pin sharp and vaguely “with it”, your aesthetic sensibilities become floppy and flabby post-baby.
Time disappears. In the tiny, blinking glimpses of greedily snatched free time, you watch a burst Come Dine With Me instead of The Jinx, you read the headline of a magazine instead of City On Fire. And so your style goes from large to small. If, before you drew from a well of Supreme, Comme des Garçons and Marc Jacobs, now you’re drawing from a minuscule pool of utilitarian clothes which can easily double as sponges for quickly cleaning up baby sick.
So how to dress? You don’t boss it like Drake in his practical padded jackets and boots in the Hotline Bling video (despite his dad dancing he’s not, as far as we know, an actual dad yet, even if he dresses like a hip one). You dress like you’re going camping for the rest of your life. You dress like you’re in a danger zone and have to be ready for falling shrapnel and random fires. You’re working back from the perspective of immediate fabric annihilation. Nothing lasts for long before the unblinking whirr of the endless spin cycle begins again.
The clothes that have a short shelf life are multiple and include glasses (babies love taking off your glasses, chewing on the ends and then casually tossing them away into the perilous black hole of their toy boxes), sleeves (sleeves are no longer attachments to garments, they are now merely pieces of fabric which enable nose wiping) and shoes (individual shoes will be ghosted into teeny tiny baby-sized crevices around your house. Odd shoes are no fun unless you are Cyndi Lauper circa Girls Just Wanna Have Fun). Here are the grin-and-bear sartorial essentials:
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1. Flip flops
Look, don’t hate me. But the truth is, flip flops are incredibly low maintenance and easy. Once you get past the idea that the only people who wear flip flops live in Clapham and frequent Walkabout pubs, you realise that they’re very comfy. In fact, your inner hatred of them means that you don’t really mind if they disappear into a stray dirty nappy.
2. A fleece
Shockingly, the fleece’s strange outdoorsy fabric is very compatible with a baby. It’s basically wipe clean, so no matter the level of sick, poo or a combination of both, it doesn’t really matter. I’d recommend something in khaki that will hide the most abhorrent of baby stains.
3. Camo pants
Do baby friendly trousers exist? Aside from waterproof ones people wear on Iron Man challenges, maybe not. The best bet if you can’t stand the joggers or sad baggy jeans, are camo pants. Again, the main thing here is wearing something which easily masks the randomised shower of baby drool/Ella’s pouch mulch which is now your life.
4. Lots of hoodies
American Apparel may have been lots of things: morally questionable, overpriced, but they do damn fine hoodies. Great for everyday, zip-on and zip-off dad duty.
5. A T-shirt of a band you vaguely remember
Remi Nicole. Remember her? No of course you don’t! She was never actually famous but somehow was big enough to bless us with at least one huge, ugly oversize T-shirt which is perfect baby handling wear. Also see: every shit band you saw in the mid 00’s whose merchandise you still own, but which is ideal if you don’t mind ruining it.
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