Alpha 60 Silk Rhino Print Sweat

Jurgen VanTramp - The glittering career begins

Look at this photo. I mean really look at it. Take a few minutes to completely scrutinise every facet of this image, then try to think what the glaring mistake may be; bearing in mind that this is a photo designed to promote a sweater, the defining feature of which is that it has the head of a rhino on the front of it. Keep pondering over that as you read this review, and at the end we'll see if you got it right or not. (No cheating by scrolling down now, Remember: winners never cheat; unless they're Tiger Woods at a golf tournament sponsored by Playboy Magazine)

First things first, if you really wanted to look like half a rhino's face had charged through your torso and stopped just short of actually breaking through your stomach's epidermis, you would be required to pay ASOS a whopping £170. If you have a hard time grasping the concept of numerical currency, that's the equivalent of 22.31 35cl bottles of Bell's whiskey from behind the counter of the Tesco Metro on Whiteladies Road in Bristol. This in turn adds up to a grand total of 780.85cl, roughly 7.8 litres of  the cheapest mid-quality blended scotch whiskey. If you laid each of those litres end to end it would probably work out to be around the length of a Citroen Zsara Estate. Now that's a meaty length of the true amber nectar by anyone's standards, yet that is honestly how much ASOS equate the price of one of their wearable boulder-scrotums.

Fuck you ASOS, how much money do you think the average Joe spends on clothes? I myself own a fairly  snazzy suit that I bring out only for special occasions, and it cost £140. That's including every-fucking-thing; shoes, trousers, black shirt, waistcoat, red tie (hells yeah) and the crowning glory of the fitted blazer. Don't you dare try and suggest that there exist people stupid enough to spend this much money on a jumper that looks like an Easter Island statue's arse after it's sat on one of the Muppets.

Yes Jurgan, you are earning your three pounds an hour

This here is the moment the photographer obviously asked his model to turn around to flaunt the awesome two-way mirage this design portrays. As Jurgan VanTramp clearly shows, the back is the best feature of the sweatshirt because it in no way tries to emulate the skin of a rhino and thus leads to zero disappointment. According to my own private sources, the story behind old Jurgan VanTramp here is that the designer was auditioning for models to show off this tour de force of an upper garment, when in shuffled this guy towards the end of the proceedings. He was supposed to be carrying out part of his community service by cleaning up the graffiti behind the disused Anderson shelter from where the interviews were being conducted and had only briefly crawled inside to sneak a crafty cigarette away from his watchful probation officer. He wasn't exactly the epitome of what one seeks in a male model, but was hired on the spot as he'd been the only person to show up that day.

Notice how elegantly the cuff's trim matches that of the waistband, stopping dead in it's tracks any passing resemblance this jumper has of an actual rhino. This is an obvious attempt by the designer to diffuse the amount of people who would, upon bearing witness to an aficionado of animal-wear such as this on any given high street leaping head-first into the nearest shop window in a futile attempt to avoid the oncoming onslaught of what they may perceive to be a charging rhinoceros protecting its young.

Did you guess it? Probably not. Sucks to be you. 

Now I don't pretend to possess many Photoshop abilities, everything I know of that particular Adobe program is self taught. Yet even I can turn the original photo into something that better shows off the sweaters' capabilities. Simply by having asked Jurgan to pump his right arm, the photographer could have given the impression of this 'Silk Rhino Print Sweat' as actually having a horn. I mean seriously, who wants a photo-realistic print of a rhino's left eye and nostril? If I wear a t-shirt with a rhino print on it, I want to be making up for something. I want to prove my manliness to the whole world. I want to be able to walk into any bar in Glasgow and scream "I've got a rhino on my t-shirt, and if any of you try to fuck with me I will destroy everything you've ever seen!" 

And you can be sure it is never, ever, going to be capable of that unless it has on it the rhino's pinnacle of evolutionary manhood, the same kind of defensive organic horn that middle aged men the World over crush into little blue pills in the vague hope of emulating the same structures' constant virility. I hereby award it a paltry 3 out of 10, and that is just because ASOS managed to find a model as pathetically dishevelled looking as the actual piece of clothing they were trying to sell.