I AM very interested in the revival of the shoulder pad. It is flying back into our lives – and our jackets and our cardigans and our dresses and our coats – at a crucial moment, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
One hesitates to identify the shoulder pad as an economic or cultural signifier but, what the hell, those economists aren’t shy about explaining things they don’t understand, so let’s just bang ahead with it: the shoulder pad is a sign of war, or as we like to say in this country, of emergency. And there are an awful lot of shoulder pads around.
Back when things were booming and prosperous in our economy women were wearing floaty dresses and velvet-trimmed cardies to the office. Female work-wear was so unstructured that you might as well have been sitting at your desk in your vest; of course the vests were velvet-trimmed as well. The cardigans hardly had buttons. It may seem extraordinary that during the richest time this country has ever known, a time when Irish women were present in the workforce in greater numbers than they had ever been before, that at that exact time women chose to look like either a) shepherdesses, admittedly shepherdesses who had seen rather a lot of life, or b) as if they were walking along the seafront in Marbella. But we did.
And there was cleavage everywhere, as has been discussed in this column before. Yes, breasts were certainly big. However, breasts might be going under cover for a while now, as shoulders sharpen for their dive into the downturn.
The clothes for autumn/winter 2009 (as we fashion correspondents like to say) are going to have women dressing for success, dressing for an executive career, dressing for the boardroom take-over. We’ve seen it all before. The only problem is that there just aren’t the jobs around to wear the shoulder pads to. Talk about being all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Most sensible women love the shoulder pad, and in recent unstructured years many have worn it in secret, because it makes the waist and upper arms look much slimmer than they really are, and squares shoulders that are beginning to hunch. For a decade the shoulder pad has been a love that dare not speak its name; but now it is well and truly out of the closet. Aesthetically we might be pleased at the revival of the shoulder pad, but sociologically it is a disaster. Because sad to say, the shoulder pad has frequently been accessorised by the dole queue. The shoulder pad is a symptom of a culture’s willingness to work when work is scarce.
The shoulder pad, when worn by women, signals fortitude in times of distress.
The last woman wearing shoulder pads to have had an impact on Irish culture was Joan Collins, God bless her, who played Alexis in Dynastyduring the bad times in the Eighties. For those of you who do not remember the Eighties, it was a time when most of our young people had quit the country in order to find jobs, and things were kind of quiet here for quite a while. As far as anyone left at home to watch Dynasty can recall Alexis didn't really have a job; she just had a lot of jackets and a truck-load of red lipstick to help her with her business plans. Yes, this attitude may seem a bit familiar to those of us who have observed the optimism of Fianna Fáil's economic strategies over the years. But the difference was that Alexis's tactics usually worked; that, as Miss Prism would say, is fiction for you.
I think that it is true to say that Ireland took Alexis and Joan Collins to our hearts immediately, as the empty country echoed around us. Her shoulder pads showed her determination to triumph by fair means or foul. We loved her because she was an evil fighter with no morals whatsoever. In a world where we had no economic role models a woman in shoulder pads was good enough for us; by us I mean the Irish as a nation, both women and men. Men, after all, have never really abandoned their shoulder pads, which are the discreet mainstay of most executive suits. The last man wearing shoulder pads to have had an impact on Irish culture was Bertie Ahern.
The other great heyday of the shoulder pad was the second World War or, as we like to call it, the Emergency. We may not have been bombed – well, only by mistake – or invaded, but we certainly saw the films. Both British and American girls survived the war wearing shoulder pads and straight, relatively short skirts (fabric was in short supply). The heroines’ shoulder pads were so wide that they almost constituted an air-borne division in their own right.
You have to say that this power dressing was bound to leave an impression on susceptible Irish women, even though they had started the war, as it were, with wardrobes that only contained Aran jumpers and rosary beads. Shoulder pads have always been good for morale. Let’s hope that they work as well this time.