Alexis Petridis: Tie-dye - get knotted

The fashion world is proving admirably persistent in its attempt to get men to wear tie-dye. They've been at it for years, unabashed by the fact that tie-dye comes with the kind of connotations that would cause anyone of sound mind to think twice about wearing it. It's not so much the unreconstructed hippy thing – although, once you wear it past a certain age, you risk being mistaken for one of those weird Americans who spent their summers following the Grateful Dead long past their sell-by date and insisting on being addressed as Wind Dancer. Nor is it the existence on the internet of what you might call fundamentalist tie-dye evangelists, including one terrifying woman who appears to have clad an entire class of schoolkids in tie-dye clothes, then taken pictures of them, an action that laughs in the face of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child . No, it's something worse. It's Terry Pratchett books and Games Workshop . It's the implication that elsewhere in your wardrobe there may lurk a T-shirt that says "SMEG HEAD" and that, on occasion, when someone asks what you're having in the pub, you smirkingly ask for a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster . Under the circumstances, perhaps dip-dye is the answer. It's tie-dye's cooler brother and arrives free of the inference of chakra-realignment or Red Dwarf fandom. It doesn't automatically look like it should be teamed with a pair of Velcro-fastening sandals: faint praise, perhaps, but praise nonetheless. • Alexis wears T-shirt, £12.99, by Uniqlo . Jeans, £85, by Nudie, from Liberty . Trainers, Alexis's own. Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian. Styling: Aradia Crockett. Grooming: Nicki Palmer at Mandy Coakley.