Just pants.

Aren't bookstores great! They're full of books. Proper books. Books that make you feel like the intellectual you always hoped everyone else would mistake you for. Books that people will see upon walking into your flat and suddenly be overcome with the thought that they like to have sex with people who like books. So, as someone who recently purged a vast array of DVDs specifically to create more space on his bookshelf to fill with said books, I just pointed myself in the direction of the Plaza's glorious Waterstones store to do just that. (The book buying bit, not the casual sex with other bibliophiles bit. This isn't about to turn into some kind of book based dogging. Mr Cameron would never approve of that)

Which is when it happened. The boundless joy of nosing through the shelves in the kind of chaos free oasis that, in central London, only a bookstore can provide came crashing down like a, well fine, I can't think of a good enough metaphor for once, but trust me, it hit the ground hard.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just witnessed something that should simply never have been allowed to be. Something that was not only terrifying, but that as a man I have literally no frame of reference point over how to deal with.

While happily nosey through a collection of, inevitably alluring, fantasy books, I casually turned my head and saw, well, frankly there's no good way of putting this. In fact it's so far from being right that I'm going to devote an entire paragraph to the sentence to describe it.

Three teenage girls, wearing jeans, with their knickers on over the top of their Jeans!

Seriously fashion, what the actual fuck was that? Normally at this point I'd love to share a photo with you as evidence, but as I'm not a complete moron, I realised pretty much instantaneously that attempting to photograph this monstrosity had somewhere between slim and no chance of not landing me with a lengthly jail term. So you're going to have to take my word for it. But there it was. 3 teenagers going about their, largely unfathomable, lives, wearing some very large pants, over some reasonably baggy Jeans. Just, just stop for a second, and picture that.

I know fashion's had it's fair share of train wrecks over the years. Shell-suits were liable to spontaneously engulf their owner in flames. Emo hair was the equivalent to voluntary cataracts on one side of your face. Skinny Jeans was fashion's least subtle effort to sterilise the male population. And I was once a Goth. But this, this just defies explanation. It's bad enough that many men under the age of 30 have seemingly gotten so bored with getting dressed that they give up half way through pulling their trousers up, but at least they've remembered the basic order in which to apply clothing!

I've literally spent the past 45 minutes trying to comprehend why a person would do this. My best idea was simply that it was a bet. They were all young enough to be on some school trip. So it might have been a joke. Some glorious youthful hijinks that they'll have a good chuckle about later.

Then I came back to the office and saw this on Twitter:

No fashion. No. Even Superman's gotten past this now.

*NB Tweet stolen from the excellent @peachesanscream who you should probably follow.