I grew up in the countryside in Ireland, where fashion was not a term or topic discussed amongst the men. When there was somewhere to go, brown shoes and jeans dragging on the floor was the go to. It was not a decision formed from individual taste but more a uniform to wear so nobody had to think about you. Any form of style, any separation from the herd, was read as a soft-lad thing, in the most classic “sure why would you care about that” type of notion.
My own rebellion, when it came, was the standard issue one. Baggier jeans than anyone in the parish and hoodies in bold colours. I thought it was groundbreaking work, influenced by hip hop and skaters from the States. I was once asked if my basketball shorts were a skirt. However, it took a good few years and a few bigger cities to see the size of the room I had been standing in. Around the artists, architects and designers of Europe, Ireland's lack of intent became even more apparent to me, as did my attempts to stand out from it.
So where between London's tailoring and Paris fashion week did Irish men fall into this state of perpetual stylistic apatheia. Pitti Uomo, a fair for nothing but men's clothes in Florence held every year since 1972, is an hour's flight away, while the successful Irish expatriates thriving in London have not brought back the fruits of their labour in Savile Row suits and accessories.
It is not a money story either, or not the way people think. In 1980 clothing and footwear took just under nine percent of what an Irish household spent. By 2023 it was under four. We got richer and we spent half as much of it on what we wear. Whatever the herd was enforcing, it was not thrift.
The D4 crowd might take a different view, and they would be half right, there has always been more room in a city to be looked at. But the decision driving most Irish men's wardrobes, city or country, is still the branded jacket and the branded shoes, do I need to mention Helly Hansen. Items chosen to show what you spent rather than what you chose. Wealth-signalling is not style. It is the uniform again with a bigger badge.
Now it's not to say we don't have our cultural references of both the past and now. The Aran jumper came off the islands and by 1947 was being sold to our American cousins. Steve McQueen even wore one.
Then there's our county colours. For years a pair of O'Neills shorts off the pitch was a red flag, signalling the Irish lad on holiday at the far end of the beach. However this opinion, and mine included, has changed thanks to a lad from Maynooth. O'Neills put their shorts sales up twenty percent the year Normal People aired. Mescal's GQ photo shoot featured him in a vintage Kildare pair under a fleece, and Gucci sold a pair of swim shorts in what everybody in Mayo recognised as their beloved county colours.
Which is the long way round to what this is for. Lisheenaleen is not going to put anyone back in a suit, and it is not going to sell anybody an Aran jumper as a costume. The intention is slower and less grand than that. Find the things still made properly on this island and the men who wear them. If that changes anything about how Irish men dress it will be by accident, which is the only way it was ever going to happen.
What I want to push toward, further and further, is a sense of expressive freedom for Irish men. The name calling and commentary will always be there, it's part of the gift of the gab, however a release of the close-mindedness is worth celebrating too. To be an outlier you have to have something to stand out from, and we have it in spades.
A man in a good coat in a Cork town on a Tuesday gets a reaction that a man in the same coat in Milan would never get. That is not a problem. That is the whole point of putting it on.
