Fashion-challenged, and proud of it.

Today's Boston Globe features a roving-reporter piece interviewing Bostonians about their home town's recent selection as both the crabbiest and worst-dressed city in the country.

The crabbiness is another question for another day; suffice to say that I would a whole lot rather be crabby than artificially and intrusively "friendly" like some other parts of the country. (Yes, there is a middle ground. It's called Chicago, and if we could borrow a little of that town's unforced congeniality, we would be the better for it.)

But the fashion bit? I acknowledge it. In fact I celebrate, nay, revel in it.

There is nothing in the universe sillier than fashion. (Well, OK, maybe libertarianism.) Clothes exist to keep us warm, to protect us from the elements, and to hide the parts of ourselves that are considered taboo because they remind us of sex and we have enough trouble keeping our minds off sex as it is. They have no higher purpose, and in the absence of any higher purpose, we should feel free to please ourselves.

There is, therefore, one simple criterion to be met by any piece of clothing we put on: we should feel comfortable in it.

Now, it's true that "comfortable" is a multi-faceted concept. It encompasses not simply physical comfort--the garment should be of the appropriate weight for the season and somewhat less scratchy than 150-grit sandpaper--but also psychosocial comfort. We should feel that the clothes we wear are well suited to the situations we will face in them, and that they make us look (within the limits of the possible) good.

But the fashionistas miss a simple truth: that last part is for us to decide, and no one else. I don't care whether the shirt I'm wearing fits someone else's concept of what looks good, as long as it fits mine. If I feel like a presentable person in it, that's enough. Others are certainly entitled to their opinions, and if they want to have a good laugh at what presentability means to me, they should absolutely enjoy it.

But that's not good enough for the fashionistas. They want to set up a quasi-objective standard (which changes every few weeks), judge people's wardrobe choices by it, and, if those choices are found wanting, subject them to criticism that often seems to go right past the aesthetic to the moral, as if wearing pleated trousers were not just in questionable taste, but really wrong. They talk about fashion errors as if they were an urgent social problem to be solved, somewhere on the same priority list as homelessness and global warming.

What a perverse waste of time all of this is. And the fact that Bostonians, by and large, couldn't care less about it speaks to our good sense and our well-ordered priorities.