Mr Big

I'm still reeling that GQ has named Romeo Beckham as a style icon, despite being just eight years old.

If I'm honest I've never given him a second look. He's just one of the Beckham sprogs that are wheeled out at every event when they turn up en famille. I've always viewed them as mere fashion accessories, as is the trend these days.

But on closer inspection this boy is like a junior Niles Crane, all neat hair, stripey ties and stiff suits. According to his mother he's not interested in going to the beach with the other boys, he likes to accompany her to the offices of her fashion line and discuss fabrics, etc. I think it's safe to say where this one's going.

Fair enough, everyone's different, but seriously what eight-year-old takes such an interest in fashion? When I was eight I didn't have much choice in what I wore. Not that I cared. It was royal blue hand-knitted chunky surgical collar-style polo-neck jumpers from Auntie Maggie, who had nothing much better to do following the hip replacement she had after falling off a bus in 1971. Otherwise it was normal blue jeans, lots of brown flares and plimsoles. More often than not it was shorts too, and I have seen pictures of flowery shirts with matching ties, but none of this was my idea.

I didn't sit poring over Look-In wanting to copycat David Cassidy's wardrobe. Mum did once buy me some purple trousers and a T-Rex T-shirt (not to be tucked in but I couldn't resist - I was something of a formal child, and even wore a tie to the beach, so the story goes), but I didn't take to it.

As I got to be a teenager fashion became important. But I do wonder how many eight-year-olds, even today, give a fig about looking up-to-date. When you see kids who are dressed head to toe in something their parents would happily wear, it's not the kids who are making the decisions. I have a friend with as son who's a mini-me of him, and you can see he's dressing him in the sort of clothes he'd like to have worn as child, rather than the clothes his parents chose for him.

I'm convinced that back in the Seventies there wasn't really fashion for kids, certainly not in the first half of the decade anyway, and definitely not in the Sixties. A boy in our class (aged 10, 1975) had wedge shoes, which I considered unbelievably racy, and of course we all wore flares, but that was kind of it. Unless, I'm wrong here, fashion was for adults.

So they're starting young these days. And an eight-year-old has become a style icon. It's absurd. No child should be so obsessed with such things. The parents encourage it of course, and of course children must express themselves, but it's an odd one. Then again, who takes any notice of GQ, the world's most ridiculous magazine?