How To Dress Well: Rick From The Young Ones

(P)Rick. What a stylish twat.

If you ever find yourself sitting around a dinner table with friends, cheap Merlot in hand, casually debating the TV characters you’d most love to hang out with for a day, chances are Rick from The Young Ones will be about as far from the discussion as Dawn from Buffy or Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother. He’s a bratty, whiny, lispy, pretentious, pseudo-‘anarchic poet’, with a weird penchant for Cliff Richard. Or, as his nutcase punk housemate Vyvyan succinctly puts it one episode (after Rick asks, “Why don’t you like me?”), he’s “a complete bastard”. Well, even bastards know how to dress.

Take, for example, the well-fitted blazer. It’s hard for a young dude to successfully pull off a blazer without looking like a banker or some lame frontman from a shitty mid-2000’s guitar band, but Rick shows us how to make it timelessly cool: a couple of casually fastened badges on the lapel, a buttoned-up shirt collar, and some dirty hair stuff. That’s some classic early ’80s, Mod/New Wave/Anglo-style right there. The only thing that’s missing is Alexei Sayle’s rendition of “Dr. Marten’s Boots”.

Men’s black blazer from ASOS: $73.90
Long-sleeved shirt from American Apparel: $87.00
Set of 9 pin badges from Etsy: $4.72