Denim
He works at a gin bar that sells $19 mac and cheese balls and plays Biggie Smalls. He likes the gin, he's genuinely convinced it’s worth its own bar on the gentrified side alley it's found on.

He has a woman, she has a straight across fringe and also wears denim. They are both middle children but don't really keep in touch with their family. A dudebro drove past them together on the street recently and yelled 'you're punching'. He's pretty sure he was referring to him.

Blue with a small, nondescript repeated image on it (pattern)
His wife buys five of these at once - one, two, three, four, five in one swipe across the shelf and wraps one up for Christmas and one up for Father’s Day immediately.

He meets her for lunch because they conveniently work in the same suburb and one day he feels self-conscious when a twenty-something woman sitting opposite them at the ramen place overhears them arguing about how often he's cooked pork for dinner that month.

Pale insipid blue
He works at JBHiFi which is a 54-minute bus ride from his house in morning traffic. He’s very attentive to his girlfriend and they are in love, despite the fact that she falls asleep early at night before he’s finished talking.

There is always the lover and the loved, his mum used to say. He remembers this in his dreams and forgets about it in reality.

Black and red lumberjack check
He pairs these with those jeans rolled up at the bottom and has very clean sneakers on. Always.

He loved someone two years ago and asked them to move cities to be with him. They didn't move. He cut contact with them as soon as they decided. Anything else was too hard.

Each payday comes and goes too quickly because it’s spent on cool brands that have their name emblazoned across the chest. It doesn’t matter if he likes it or not because he can always sell it for more.

Some nights he wonders what would have happened, those two years ago, but then usually distracts himself with something else.

White, just plain white
He is actually quite stylish. He knows this because he knows the value of a crisp, white shirt and only washes them on hot. He learned this from Maria, his parents' cleaner, who continued to work for them after him and his sister left high school and moved out. Recently he has been going on a lot of Tinder dates because he doesn't like going home straight from work.

In the mornings he goes to the gym but if he doesn’t do anything at night, his loft-style apartment is too big and clean and white and he doesn’t know what to do. The girls on the dates are nice, they like him, he likes some of them. He thinks one of them may be worth properly pursuing.

Black cotton linen blend
He's been thinking about changing his job for a while. At night on the ride home on the train, he dreams about having hands sore from doing physical things and not the tension headache he carries from being on the phone to clients and convincing them that the ideas they’re selling them are the right ones. Life seems complicated and simple to fix at the same time.

Across the bridge, over the water and beyond the motorway, he sees a motorbike zip back where he came from. He wants to be tinkering on these, his hands big and gruff and black and gritty. He wants to be doing this and not on the way to an Asian fusion restaurant with 7 friends and their respective partners because they’re 29 now and that’s what it seems you call the person you’ve been sleeping with.