(The Guardian)

Forget the grey slip-ons and elasticated waists of middle age. Simon Mills can boast a pair of shoes for every one of his 42 years, plus 25 pairs of trousers and six leather jackets, 12 pairs of jeans and 50 shirts, 20 suits and ...

I have more clothes than my wife. A lot more. She is a thoroughbred clotheshorse but I am a fullyfledged clothes hoarder. A clothes whore, in fact. Where Mrs Mills has a 12ft-long floor-to-ceiling wall of bedroom wardrobes to store her frocks, I have a whole room of my own. Two industrial strength chrome rails creak under the weight of 40 plastic zip-up covers that hide around 20 suits, a dozen blazers and sports jackets, and 25 pairs of trousers. There's more in an adjacent cupboard.

Six leather jackets, a couple of sheepskins, seven or eight winter coats, endless outdoor wear. On a large shelving unit I have my shirts. Even after a recent cull there are still at least 50. Mainly city-boy stripes, pastel-coloured jobs from Jermyn Street or cut-away collars from Italy. These sit next to leaning towers of T-shirts, knitwear and jeans (12 pairs) above a two-deep row of 40-odd pairs of shoes and boots. In an international section there is a dish-dash from the UAE, a kaftan from Turkey, sandals made by a Tarahumara tribesman and a pair of cream ostrich-skin cowboy boots bought from Chihuahua, Mexico.
In my defence, I'm not particularly proud of my dressing room and its contents. In fact, there are moments when I find my overindulgent wardrobe habit very embarrassing indeed. For a heterosexual, family man of 42, such narcissistic profligacy is unbecoming. It suggests a shallow and materialistic popinjay who has got his priorities all skewwhiff. A middle-aged man should have more important things on his mind than how he dresses. I should have stopped caring about my clothing long, long ago. I should be concerned with gardening, whittling and fretwork. I should be starting my grey slip-ons and elasticated waistband years. Shouldn't I? At least I am prudent. My clothes are built to last. I have shoes that are older than my 12-year marriage, shirts and suits that are older than my children. And at least I am not a fashion victim. That would be really undignified. While all my clothes are of a certain quality and most labeled with recognisable names, there is nothing particularly directional or "fashion forward" in there. I'm just not into "designer". I even go so far as to use the word in a pejorative sense. On a man whose age is bigger than his waist size, a look that screams of a label is not a good one.

Oh, I flick through men's fashion magazines, keep up with trends and know which names to drop in fashion-centric conversations. But new collections and the latest silhouettes (inevitably the same as the silhouettes from three or four years ago) aren't really relevant now. Directional styles would look desperate and inappropriate. Anyway, my clothing can give the illusion of acknowledging current fashion simply because the vast amount of stuff I have hoarded is exactly the kind of classic garb designers are always recycling, year after year. Actually, these days, an irrational fear of blokeism - a dread of dressing like a tumble-dry rugger bugger or the teddy bear-ish Top Gear presenter who isn't Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond - is what really drives my retail choices. I would rather be thought of as a square, a geek or a fogey than a squishy, unconfrontational bloke.

To stave off blokeism, I keep away from corduroy, moleskin and anything else they wear in the car park at Twickenham on match days. In a Groucho Marx-ish way, I would never want to order anything from a mail-order catalogue that has targeted me as a possible customer.

I am at the age at which sportswear worn for non-sporting inactivity starts to look ridiculous and tragic (see hoary old members of New Order or the Happy Mondays in their "Dadidas" stripes for further reference). So no hiking impermeables or fleece in town. And unless I am wearing sneakers (Converse or Stan Smiths), I don't do casual, soft-soled shoes - the cobbling equivalent of Palm Springs, a retirement home for the feet.

Sartorially speaking, I am at a difficult age; too young to take up golf, too old to rush the net any more. Neither old enough nor young enough to adopt the current fashion for cardigans. Too young for old-man tweeds, too old to make a bit of hunting schmutter look Lock, Stock. Intarsia (diamond) pattern sweatshirts, say, are great on young scallies and T4 presenters but make me look like Bruce Forsyth. More than anything, "comfort" as a prerequisite is what I must avoid if I want to maintain any semblance of a libido about my style.

I am constantly making up new rules for myself, the latest being that a man of a certain age should never wear new clothes. It looks babyish, excitable, undignified. I can't have a haircut with a name, "boot cut" jeans are not permitted and I don't "do" mid-range. For me it's either trash or epicure. Cheap three-packs of T-shirts or expensive pairs of Italian shoes. Secondhand or Savile Row. Gap or Gieves. Huntsman or Hennes.

Does anyone notice any of this? Of course not! Am I thinking about all this a bit too much? Probably. Should I care less, maybe? Well, that's kind of what I'm aiming for, to look as if I don't care too much. I want to look good - discerning, manly, sexy - but I want it to come across as effortless.

Needless to say, arriving at such agreeable impression effortlessness can be fraught with complications. "It's all about wanting to belong to a tribe, I suppose," says Gary Kemp. "Actually, that's wrong. It's all about not wanting to belong."

Kemp knows a thing about clothes. He's been fussing over them since he was a kid. When he was in Spandau Ballet he wore kilts, frilly shirts and cloaks. Style was more important than comfort. Aran sweaters were worn in hot, sticky nightclubs. He's now in his mid-40s and still he frets, on a day-to-day basis, about what he's going to wear. "As a man gets older, snob value becomes the spur. That's the hardest thing to shake. I wear casual clothes during the day, but for the evening there still has to be an element of theatre to what I'm wearing. You can't go for the big entrance, with some outrageous outfit, any more, so your style is determined by tiny little signals. Which are mostly picked up by other men."

Shoes are key for Kemp. "Alec Guinness said he always started playing a character by choosing the shoes. After that, everything else was easy. Shoes are very important on an older man."

The essence of men's clothing lies in a series of repeated templates, and a delicious kind of conservatism that is steeped in military and sporting history. Proper men's clothing (male clothes obsessives like me use words like "proper" a lot) doesn't change much. Indeed, unlike women's fashion, which mugs its rabid devotees with a rolling retail frenzy of limited edition must-haves, with men's kit you can pretty much get anything you want at any time. So if you feel your life would be better if there were a thorn-proof, Norfolk jacket on your back, you can go out and buy one.

For women, fashion is an unelectable force, all about faddish currency and the here and now. They have to keep up or feel left out and inadequate. It's the opposite for men. Once you step away from the male catwalk, it's all about authenticity and provenance. You're just looking for well-made, modern variations on a theme. Such stalwart reliability is not, as you might think, boring and fuddy-duddy; it is utterly, utterly wonderful.

Certainly, I've noticed that the concept of fashionable clothes and fashionable men has been deracinated in the past 10 or so years. I come from a generation of men who started to get serious about the trouser department in the 1980s. At that time, there were probably only about a thousand trendies in London, a small number of instantly identifiable 10-bob narcissists who would blow hard-earned fortunes at Yohji and Commes des Garçons, or hang around Camden Market and dress up like weekend Brandos. Just as Robert Elms acknowledged in his recent book The Way We Wore, you knew that if someone had spent a whole weekend churning through endless stalls of musty Americana, searching for a Lee Stormrider jacket with the corduroy that, crucially, ran parallel to the collar rather than at right angles to it, he was probably someone you could talk to.

It wasn't a class thing, it was a clothes thing; entertaining and socially coagulating. I know all this sounds hopelessly romantic and trainspotterish, but it is true. You could tell, just by the cut of an oncoming trendy's jib, just by his shoes or his haircut, what kind of music he was into, what the interior of his flat would look like, even the sort of employment he might be engaged in.

Now a man's clothing says little about him. Doing the head-to-toe once-over is an unedifying process. Most men's clothing is nothing more than fast food feeding clueless vanity. There is little attention to provenance or quality, just a "route one" method to cut-price Beckham style. It's not really fashion because - and this is the really mad thing - it is very difficult to buy unfashionable clothes any more. Everyone is trendy. All the shops are "trendy". Dunn & Co is gone, done, dead. John Collier ("the window to watch") is no more.

So, someone like telly's cheeky Jeff Brazier (former boyfriend of Jade Goody) with his "faux hawk" haircut and his artfully ripped, low-arsed jeans and white belt could walk through the edgy Nathan Barley-zone of Hoxton unchallenged. Even my bank manager has a faux hawk.

This bothers me a bit because I used to like tribalism. Maybe that's why my wardrobe is more Mr Benn than Mr Byrite. Why I enjoy the way a hint of a uniform provides us cosy, urban, emasculated males with a sense of formality, authority, heroism, propriety and adventure.

As a kid, I was a shameless sartorial dilettante, dabbling in rock'n'roll, punk, soul boy, new romantic, hard times chic and Japanese minimalism, blowing like the wind in the wardrobe area whenever a new musical fashion emerged. Even now, I still feel good and "proper" in American workwear, army surplus, motorbike leathers and cowboy gear. And, yes, I am aware this makes me sound like a solo embodiment of all six members of the Village People, but that can't be helped.

My dressing-up box doesn't always pay dividends. The other day, I inherited a leather flying jacket from my dad. It's the real deal. An authentic US Air Force issue, A1 bomber jacket in toffee brown with patch pockets and zipper front. Just like the Mustang pilots used to wear. "You can't go out wearing that," said my wife coldly when I put it on. "You look like..." Who? Steve McQueen in The Great Escape? "Nope," she said, cruelly milking the moment. "More like Dennis Waterman."