Clothing fashions are strange things. I don't mean fashion as in the randomly bizarre things they wear on catwalks. I mean fashions as in general trends, like big ties, big hair, flared trousers, totally bald heads, male hair dyed red, metal attachments to the face, women wearing trousers, women baring their navels, that kind of thing.

The one I've been noticing lately is the male habit of wearing the shirt outside the trousers. It really hit me last night, watching Spiderman film actor Tobey Maguire being interviewed by David Letterman.

For well over a hundred years, and despite severe challenges during the nineteen sixties and seventies, the classic shirt tucked in, tie, and suit, consisting of jacket and trousers, probably matching, has ruled the roost, when it has come to formal male attire. But now suddenly things seem to be changing.

I think it may be something to do with the influence of the East. Those short half-shirt-half-jacket things worn by people like Pandit Nehru and the Chinese leaders seem to me to be the fashion influence here that is finally asserting itself in the West.

But what do I know? Maybe in ten years time masculine shirts will all be tucked back in again, and civilisation as we've always known it will be back chugging along as if nothing had happened.