What I wore this week: jeans and a going-out top

What I wore this week: jeans and a going-out top

Jeans have climbed back up the food chain, from being clothes for a Monday off to clothes for a Saturday night out

I’m not big on nostalgia, but I do quite miss the dress code that served through much of my youth, which went: 

Denim goes with everything.’ Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian

jeans and a going-out top . This was as close to a formal dress code as evening engagements – as we never, ever called them – got. It worked a treat. You had a favourite pair of jeans, and then just swapped the top in and out as if you were dressing up one of those paper dolls with tabs on them. No heart-searching over whether you should wear tights, no need for complex underwear “solutions”, and no colour clashes to think about, because denim goes with everything.

eans-and-a-going-out-top hasn’t worked as a dress code for ages. Instead, we’ve been expected to either lean in to the party spirit with frocks that add to our to-do lists (fake tan application Friday morning, dry cleaner dropoff Saturday) or create dashing androgynous lines set off by impossible-to-source obscure Japanese trainers. And sometimes you think, “I’m not styling a look book here – I’m going to the pub. Can I not just keep my jeans on, step into high heels, put on a snazzier top and be done with it?”

Well, dear reader, you can. A happy side-effect of 2016’s renewed obsession with jeans – the weirder the better, with stepped “mullet” hems and asymmetric Frankenstein patches of dark and light denim – 

has been that jeans have climbed back up the food chain, from being clothes for a Monday off to clothes for a Saturday night out. You don’t need to go that far, but you do need a modern jean, by which I mean a loose shape on the leg, a high waist and a hemline that ends at the ankle or above. Leg-lengthening hipster skinnies are for losers. Harsh but true.Now all you need is a going-out top. Anything in velvet works, as does anything that gets your shoulders out. Lace is excellent, but only with a high neckline. A bodysuit, under belted high-waist jeans, slays all-comers. That’s it. No fuss needed. Time to go out.