Want to spot an Irish man in Manhattan? Here are a few post-fashion clues . . .
WHAT DO IRISH men wear? Tough question. What do the Greeks, the Swedes, the Scots? If you agree that it's tricky to define a single fashion sense that unites the male population of an entire country, it may then give you pause to learn that in the shops of New York, we are known as the nationality that travels to Manhattan with empty suitcases on weekend breaks - not to see the sights or watch a Broadway show, but to shop. And over there, they have a good handle on what it is that Irish men like to wear.
A friend who lives in Manhattan was gritting her teeth and escorting just one such of these expeditions through that grimy stretch of lower Broadway that is dominated by Banana Republic, Levi's outlets and Old Navy - in short, Mecca for the Mick. As they wandered through their 100th such cavernous jeans shop, and my friend contemplated stabbing herself in the face with a clothes hangar rather than continue a yard further, the sales assistant caught them out of the corner of his eye, and without stepping out from behind the register, shouted out with a smile: "So, where are you all from?"
The shoppers were somehow alarmed to know they had been pegged as tourists, and the New York resident had a little chuckle at this - no doubt her first of the day. Immediately, the sales assistant jumped out from behind the counter and beckoned for them to follow him towards the back of the store to the heavily discounted sales rack. He bellowed: "I got what you want right here. What do the Irish love, Ari?" Another sales rep paused briefly from folding sweatshirts and shouted over his shoulder: "Boot-cut jeans!"
"That's right! The Irish love those boot-cut jeans." There, in front of them, row after row of those hideously unflattering, semi-flared jeans - unwanted in America - queued for adoption and transfer to a new home in Ireland.
How did we become known as a nation of boot-cut men? A disclosure - I'm not comfortable writing about fashion and my relationship with clothes, because I am now a man of a certain age, and my views no longer represent the views of men who know things about fashion.
Any stroll through the streets of our towns and cities (or a brief glance at the fashion blog, Dublin Streets) suggests to me that there are hundreds of dashing young blades au fait with the world of fashion, men who wear spray-on jeans and could provide a much more up-to-date analysis on what Irish men choose to wear on their bodies than I. They are sprightly, willowy and fey, and damn if they don't know how to look fantastic; but they must be in the minority, or else they don't shop in Manhattan.
Okay, I'll have a stab at a boot-cut-jeans theory. The thing is, there comes a point in every man's fashion life when he has to step off the carousel before he is escorted off it. That point in time isn't fixed, but it hovers somewhere around the 33-mark, the much-ballyhooed death-age of Jesus Christ, the first male supermodel to announce himself on a truly global level, the Tyson Beckford of Galilee. Before this day dawns, you'll have suspected that some avenues were invisibly closing themselves off to you. You will have sneered at a high-street trend you thought to be ludicrous, only to find yourself later bitterly admiring it on someone younger than you.
By now you can no longer wear certain items as a matter of dignity, or in extreme cases, a basic matter of physics. The arrival of skinny jeans was, for many, a Waterloo moment. I was altercating with a pair when the moment arrived, squeezing a leg in - the first salvo in the full-scale war involved in getting them around my waist.
For the first time, I noticed that the music in these shops was unacceptably loud. And then, there came a knock on the fitting-room door, and when I opened it, I was confronted by the grim reaper of fashion. And he looked great, no doubt, resplendent in the usual super-minimal, less-is-more black robe with the hood (functional), and up close I noticed for the first time that the tan-wood finish on his Prada scythe really made his hazel-brown eyes pop, and brought together the whole ensemble as well as the "Dude" Lebowski's rug did in his living room.
When the grim reaper removes the skinny jeans and escorts you out of the shop, you realise that never again will you choose your jeans - from that point onwards, they will be choosing you. When it comes, start buying for warmth and comfort, and remember, plenty of pockets for tissues, because it is over. You have now crossed the line into post-fashion. If you like, you can kid yourself that now you are free to dress like Leonard Cohen or Don Draper, but everyone knows that if you buy one suit, you need to buy five, and no one has that kind of money any more. Nothing is less flattering than a pair of boot-cut jeans. But perhaps they're really comfortable, and if they are, buy them by the suitcase-full. Die in them.
But that's not to say that the cruel advance of fashion time is all bad. Sure, you can no longer consider wearing certain T-shirts, trousers and accessories, but other looks that you might have deemed unacceptable just a few short years before will now present themselves as very real possibilities as you slide into the happy decrepitude of post-fashion life.
I'll conclude with two examples. Our complex relationship with budgie smugglers has been much commented upon in these pages and elsewhere. But the older you get, the more that wearing Speedos should be considered, for the following reason: why not?
Then there are sandals with socks. Think about it. Socks are good. And sandals are, too. So wearing one with the other must be twice as amazing. Right? If you haven't yet crossed the line into post-fashion, go free. Live life. Dance like nobody's watching, and so on. You are now post-fashion: it's less tiring, much cheaper, and feels kind of punk rock, in a way.