The daddy wears Prada

CLOTHES MAKE the man. I confirmed this a few weeks back when I wore two different shoes to work -- one brown, the other browner.

Thankfully, men’s shoes are amazingly unimaginative, which makes them virtually interchangeable. So one dark winter morning, I slipped on a right loafer from one pair and a left from another. It wasn’t till I was walking out of the parking garage and to my desk that I discovered the loafers didn’t match.

Later, about 4 p.m., I stood up at my desk and asked, “Notice anything odd about me today?”

There was a long pause.

“Where do you want us to start?” someone grumbled.

I learn now that unmatched shoes are very in. The Financial Times just reported that wearing mismatched shoes is entering the fashion mainstream.

In fact, my buddy Rich came to work last week with one loafer and one tied shoe, which is a real feat, no pun intended.

Because, to me, it’s one thing to accidentally slip on two mismatched loafers. It’s quite another to accidentally wear one laced shoe and one slip-on, as Rich did.

Think about it: Rich, a vibrant man somewhere between the ages of 45 and 90, leans down to tie one shoe and it never occurs to him that he is tying only one shoe, not the other. With Rich, I think we should all just be grateful when he remembers his pants.

By gawd, it’ll be interesting watching us baby boomer guys grow older. First, we have all the usual traits of the gracefully aging male -- forgetfulness, lust, anger, lust, midlife crises and a certain I’m-afraid-of-nothing sensibility that makes a man highly attractive to every member of the opposite sex, except perhaps his own wife.

After 25 years, his wife knows too much. She hears him in the morning pulling up his socks, grunting a little as he bends. Or hears the way his sinuses whistle when he reads the newspaper over coffee.

She sees him rub his aching back after a short car trip to the post office and thinks, “Wow, my dear dinosaur looks a little stiff today. I wonder if he’ll make it to lunch?”

In that same vein, the other day my wife asked, “What’d you do to your neck?” after I’d turned to her creakily, like Frankenstein.

“What neck?” I answered.

I pride myself on my lack of neck. In fact, I pride myself on my overall body type: no neck, stubby legs, a physique perfectly suited for tunneling under culverts or retrieving curious children out of wishing wells. Too bad, really, that I missed World War II, for I would have been a terror to the Germans under small Bavarian bridges.

But I digress. The point is that a mature man still offers a woman many things -- perspective, humor, a substantial 401(k) plan. Retiree medical? You bet your bunions, baby.

Think about it for a moment. By the time boomers hit 80, we will have sucked up all the world’s healthcare -- the gauze, the syringes, the artificial hips -- leaving none for succeeding generations, probably not even a Q-tip or a lousy throat lozenge. The time to prepare for that is now.

But I digress. Again. The point is that a mature man offers more than just a certain physical grace and cutting-edge fashion sense. The mature man can talk at length about Lamborghinis or the modern global economy. Or describe -- heck, he’ll even demonstrate -- how Baltimore’s Johnny Unitas used to drop back in the pocket, dance left, look right and zing the ball over the middle to his favorite target, Raymond Berry. Grace under pressure, that’s a mature man’s metier.

Speaking of football, what are we going to talk about at work now that the season is over? I mean, I could go on for months still about that Boise State win, but I detect a certain fatigue in the eyes of my co-workers when I bring it up for perhaps the 40th time.

By the way, did you happen to hear about the Boise State player who flicked the ball back to his teammate on that perfectly executed fourth and forever? Sports Illustrated asked him recently how he kept his cool, and the kid said, “To be honest, I didn’t realize it was fourth down.”

See, that’s what you get with a younger man. The mature man always knows what down it is, always has a plan. He can’t necessarily execute the plan, but he knows that something needs to be done.

And if you don’t find that a little sexy ... hey, check out these shoes.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. His MySpace address is myspace.com/chriserskine.