There are about 75 fashionable men in Ireland, writes Eoin Butler. The rest of us are wearing jumpers our mammies bought
IRISH MEN ARE widely renowned for our sartorial nous and our exquisite appreciation of couture. And why wouldn’t we be? When we’re not pouring over style bibles, we’re scouring clothes shops and boutiques, hunting for bargains, mixing and matching styles, and talking, always talking, about the latest designs and trends. Fashion is a drug to us. One we simply cannot get enough of.
Well, okay . . . not all of that is true. In fact, if any of the above applies to you, you’re one of a prominent, but demographically insignificant, minority. There are, I would estimate, no more than 50 to 75 of you dapper Irish gents in total.
You all know each other and you socialise together. Consequently, you may be under the impression that you represent a sizable swathe of the population. The sad truth, however, is that you barely constitute a wafer.
The cities, towns and villages of Ireland teem instead with the baggy and the bedraggled, the outmoded and the passé. For most Irishmen, fashion is a song we heard once, whose tune we half-remember and whose words we never knew.
Not that we don’t have opinions on how we wish to look and dress, you understand. We do. But our interest in the ebb and flow of contemporary style tends to taper off at about the same time as our enthusiasm for floppy hairstyles and fake IDs. Which is to say, at about 17 years of age. The idols of our formative years, therefore, exert a disproportionate influence over our sartorial habits for the whole of our lives.
Insofar as most Irishmen have a personal style, this is the key to understanding it. My first boss, a builder, had a jarring, flamboyant dress sense that was incomprehensible to me, until I came across a pile of 1970s Rod Stewart albums stacked in his sitting room. Similarly, the immaculately coiffured old man, who cycled past our house on his way to mass every Sunday, if you looked closely enough, still betrayed hints of the enduring admiration (he once confessed having) for Alan Ladd in the 1953 Western Shane.
When this writer was 17, I thought that Liam Gallagher was the coolest man on earth. Indeed, many of my generation have persisted with this delusion. You can see them swagger around town at weekends, edging towards their 30s now, but still sporting their Adidas tracksuit tops and fancying themselves (in their own heads at least) as “mad fer it” as ever.
Overwhelming evidence to the contrary, though, has long since forced me to revise my opinion of the Oasis frontman. And ever since, I’ve been a fashion refugee. Sure, I’ve looked about for alternative role models here and there. Once, after watching a season of Woody Allen films, I considered switching over to something like his professorial, tweed-jacket-and-shirt look. But the problem there was that – no more than the island where they’re switching traffic to left-hand drive – such a transition could only be accomplished by means of a swift and decisive leap.
I couldn’t turn up looking like a New York intellectual one day, and return looking like a Ballyhaunis street sweeper again the next. I’d need an entirely new wardrobe. So that was out.
Another popular style, for men my age, is this “retro” 1980s idea, where you dress up in luminous baseball caps, grow silly ironic moustaches, and so forth. I will admit that I have given this option some short consideration.
But what disqualifies me from pursuing it, as I see it, is that given my girth and slack-jawed demeanour, I’m not sure people would get that I was dressed ironically. I imagine they might assume that I was genuinely just that far out of touch. So that was out, too.
Besides, given that approximately 75 per cent of my clothes shopping is still done for me by my mother, my aunts and even my 90-year-old granny, in the small town draperies and department stores of counties Mayo and Sligo, any kind of co-ordinated sartorial feint of this magnitude would be very difficult to orchestrate.
So, like thousands of other Irishmen like me, I must be content to look like what I am: an unstylish, unsophisticated adult man wearing a jumper his mammy bought him. And sure, there’s worse things you could be.