Skinny jeans: has Zinedine Zidane's fashion travesty finally killed the look?

As far as looks go, the newly reappointed Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane’s grey blazer, skinny jeans and plimsolls combination was a killer. In that it, one hopes, signifies the final nail in the coffin for men wearing slim-fit denim. (This was the outfit Zidane chose to wear at his photo call at the Bernabeu. There were cameras. Lots of them.)

For women, skinny jeans have become almost a second skin, and although there have been recent murmurings of a comeback for knicker-exposing low-riders (please God, no), and the high street currently has a propensity for flares, it seems that skinnies are here to stay as the default cut. But, frankly, men in skinny jeans have always looked somewhat ridiculous. I refer you to Johnny Borrell, who had an awful habit of wearing white ones that looked as if he had washed them at 60C. He would almost always be topless while wearing them. I also refer you to men in Camden bars who thought they were Hedi Slimane runway models, but in reality just listened to a lot of the Fratellis and knew three chords on a guitar.

Zidane’s jeans are, on multiple levels, a mistake (as was, some might argue, his initial decision to step down from Real Madrid back in May). The jeans are a dark denim, with a “distressed” look, because apparently this is still 2005. Something that looks like a fleck of white paint adorns the back pockets, which are positioned more on Zidane’s hamstrings than his actual bum. (Pert and muscular, since you ask.) More significantly, the jean turn-ups are half the height of Zidane’s calves. These are turn-ups that, as with the wall of China, could be seen from space. (Apparently that’s a myth about the wall of China; the turn-ups I am confident about.)

Beneath those turn-ups, longer than post-Brexit passport queues, Zidane has chosen to go sockless: his ankles on full display. Up top, the jacket, bless, is a similar fit to a school blazer at least three inches too short because it’s nearly the summer and there’s no point buying a new one.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what Zidane wears or how he looks. His job is to oversee Real’s revival after the team lost successive times to arch-rivals Barcelona and were embarrassed by Ajax in the Champions League. But if he’s quickened the death of the male skinny jean, that can only be a bonus worth at least the sort of money he earned last time around as manager (a reported £4.6m). The Real (thank you) issue with hipsters was never the Wayfarers. Never the beards. It was always the skinny jeans. It was always that a guy’s genitals were as in your face as a rock formation. It was, literally, balls.