Published: July 01, 2008 10:08 am            

Hold my murse, I just saw some manpris to go with my mandals

Fashion icon and style guru that I am, I’ve been pondering whether I should take up the trends toward murses, mandals, and manpris.

Those would be man purses, man sandals, and man capri pants.

They’re becoming popular in (where else?) California, especially with people in the glamorous moving picture industry (who else?).

Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

First, the murse. My main experience with purses has been holding them while various women tried on clothes. No, not all at the same time. And I remember thinking how cumbersome they were, and heavy. In a few cases it was like holding a sack of cement (with shoulder strap). If anything, purses make me feel sorry for women because the people who make their clothes are unfamiliar with the concept of pockets.

This probably indicates the need for some sort of heavy-duty therapy, but as soon as I read about murses I flashed back to kidhood and my mother’s purse, a veritable landfill of tobacco crumbs, loose change, dried-up ballpoint pens, half-sticks of gum, slightly used tissues, and lint from unidentified sources. Every time she told me to look for the car keys in her purse I got the willies. In fact, thinking about it just now sent my backbone into one of those involuntary shivers.

But that’s not the real problem with murses. The real problem is you have to match your murse with your shoes. This is going to be tough for guys, who have been known to wear different-colored socks four days out of five.

And wouldn’t those socks look good under a pair of mandals? These are not sandals in the hippies sense of the word, or the old-man-at-the-beach sense of the word. They’re more like in the shower-shoes-made-of-leather sense of the word. And they come in a variety of bright summer colors, all the better to contrast with the mismatched socks.

No thanks. Most men I know have four pairs of shoes: A black pair, a brown pair, a tennis pair, and a weekend pair, the last being an old example of any of the above. And the weekend pair is often sufficiently ventilated to pass for sandals anyway.

Which means you could wear them with manpris, also known as Capri pants for men.

Where I come from, men don’t even wear shorts. I haven’t worn shorts in decades, partly because of my upbringing and partly because I’m too polite to inflict that kind of horror on innocent strangers. Capri pants are simply out of the question.

I do recall a similar kind of trouser in the early 1960s. We called them “clamdiggers.” They were customarily worn with a surfer shirt and a pair of sneakers for that “Hey gang, let’s go have a nifty wing-ding down at the beach” look so appropriate for teens in the landlocked Midwest.

All I remember of them is that the people who wore them always had big scabs on their ankles from scraping them against the curb. I imagine the same would be true for manpris. Besides, they just look really dumb.

So there you go. No murses, mandals, or manpris for me — and not just for the reasons cited above.

In an outfit like that, I would look disturbingly like my Aunt Viola. And that’s a sight that would give EVERYONE the willies.

© 2008 Mike Redmond. All Rights Reserved.

        

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