By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

When a friend first described me as a looking like an unmade bed, my initial reaction was to wonder what my enemies were saying.

After a few minutes reflection, though, I had another thought: Hey, I resemble that remark.

Fashion, shall we say, has never been my forté. If anything, I've spent a big part of my life cultivating a sort of anti-fashion, a look that most men crave, but few are brave enough to actually put forth beyond the carport.

Sometimes I proudly feel like a pair of brown shoes in a tuxedo world. Dungarees and T-shirts. Shorts and slippers. Jeans and an aloha shirt, when it's absolutely necessary. These are the ways men dress for comfort, not success.

(It's the way they'd like to see women dress, too. A survey by the Levi's people a few years back found that 72 percent of all men thought their lady friends looked sexiest in torn-off blue jeans and a T-shirt.)

So I really wasn't that offended by the unmade-bed remark.

Others, though, took it personally on my behalf. My wife, who fights a usually losing battle to ensure that I never leave the house with holes in my pants or socks, thought it was a rude thing to say.

An office mate tried to cheer me up by saying I looked more like a rumpled couch.

"No, a comfortable chair," someone else piped in.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I liked being an unmade bed.

After all, the golden rule of men's fashion might go something like this: Never trust a man who always has a crease in his pants.

It turns out I'm not alone in being a happily unmade bed. A quick Google check showed that I was in some pretty good company:

• An award-winning exhibit at London's Tate Gallery features an unmade bed surrounded by underwear, cigarette packets and empty bottles. (One female visitor was so unimpressed that she attacked the composition with a container of Vanish pre-wash spray, according to news reports.)
• "The Unmade Bed" is a best-selling novel by French author Françoise Sagan. Described as a love story of private passions, it has been published in 16 countries.
• Jerry Garcia, the legendary guitarist for the Grateful Dead, once met former Vice President Al Gore while wearing worn sweat pants and his trademark black T-shirt. He looked "like an unmade bed," Gore reportedly said, not without envy.
• Robert Redford often is said to resemble an unmade bed. So is Colin Firth. ("Oooh. Colin Firth and an unmade bed in the same sentence. I'm hot," said one fan on an Internet chat line.)
• The firm EssayEdge, which helps high school students score high on college entrance examinations, recommends using this sentence in your application to Harvard: "Although my mother disapproves, I consider an unmade bed a symbol of rest and quietude."

I couldn't agree more. All I can do is hope that I really do resemble that remark.