My wife’s response should have warned me.

I told her I had been invited to the GQ Best Dressed Man awards. She burst out laughing.

I don’t have self-image hang-ups or issues with appearance, but that hurt.

I like a good get-up as much as the next guy, but I’d be lying if I claimed to be at the cutting edge of fashion. Unless rugby shirts count. Or ripped jeans from Istanbul.

But I clean up okay and, anyway, GQ represents formidably rugged types, not just Johnny Depp clones.

As David Beckham once said, “I like nice clothes, whether they’re dodgy or not.”

I had been at Ellis Park the day before for the Currie Cup final. To a man, rugby supporters are in desperate need of a mass makeover. Shorts and slops and beer bellies have been de rigueur for years. Fat chance of running into a GQ photographer in Doornfontein. A mechanic, perhaps, but never a GQ man.

Off to Summer Place, the swanky venue that was once home to sanctions-busting billionaire Marino Chiavelli. Nice pad for a party.

GQ boss man Craig Tyson told us that people petition to crack the Top 10 and beg and plead, to no avail. “You don’t find us, we find you.”

“It’s not about the clothes. It’s about attitude. Style. Changing the rules.”

Rebels, the lot of them.

Heaven knows where they were looking. Teko Modise, the soccer player, I knew. I recognised one other finalist as someone often spotted around my office building and another as a top muso. Other than that, nada.

Time for a new comfort zone.

The best-dressed guy I know is Demarte Pena, and he’s a Mixed Martial Artist. He makes people bleed for a living, but, damn, he’s a natty dresser away from the hexagon.

I work in behind-the-scenes television where dressing up means wearing a belt or checking for matching socks. It was much the same in newspapers, although there were two splendid exceptions in my time at the Sunday Times: Lesley Mofokeng and Craig Jacobs. These two cranked the style quotient up all on their own, so it wasn’t surprising to see both on the party list.

Lesley introduced my missus and me to freelance stylist Theo Ngobeni, owner and creative director of Mr Slimfit. Cool, confident guy. As you’d have to be if you traded in a career in investment banking for fashion. But he pulls the look off. And now he dresses the bankers he used to work with.

Summer Place was a hotbed of style, although it was definitely a case of narrow preferences. As razor-sharp host (and comedian) Trevor Gumbi remarked, one guy looked as if he had been styled in Lesotho where the tribal Seanamarena blanket is celebrated.

Another looked as if he had just climbed out of bed, probably on account of what looked like radiant pyjamas. But, eh, each to his own. I buy my socks at Woolworths.

Oh, and Micasa frontman J’Something walked away with the big gong.