Note: This post is not directed at any Irish man or woman of my personal acquaintance. I appreciate both your excellent taste in clothing and your sense of humor.
This is a promo shot from Mean Girls. It will make better sense contextually in a few paragraphs, but I need a thumbnail.
Irish fashion can be pinned down to a few key elements, especially among the arts student population at UCD. Flatmate Ciaragh has come up with an inspired name for a female art student- a YOP. This acronym chromatically describes a female specimen top to bottom: Yellow, Orange, Pink. Irish girls are rather fond of changing not only their hair color, but also the tone of their skin. I see no reason for this, since I find dark hair, redheads and freckles rather striking, but apparently this does not hold true in the Irish state. Cake on a few layers of makeup, die your hair pink or aqua, and you're on your way to appearing Irish.
I haven't taken any pictures of Irish students because that's creepy. Even I have a sense of boundaries- I only photograph random children.
Next we reach the clothes. I have on multiple occasions walked behind groups of girls wearing almost exactly the same outfit. Short shorts or a mini mini skirt over tights, leather boots, a massive shoulder bag, a top and a cardigan. Think the Plastics, but with more knits. The prevalence of this outfit does not exclude the occasional sighting of Uggs, Cruggs (the homely love child of Crocs and Uggs), and Jaggings (like jeggings, only with Jaguars). I can go for hours without seeing a pair of jeans or a backpack, and only through immense personal restraint can I stifle the fingertip-length-rule brainwashing in me to stop the exclamation of "PANTS!" in my throat.
Guys too wear a distinctive Irish look. If you are an Irish male, cultural standards demand you take every opportunity to don sweatpants, prohibit you from wearing any form of waterproof clothing, and advise you to style your hair in duckfin fashion. If middle school was your jam, you're all over this right now.
Going out attire is a different matter altogether. For the most hyperbolized example of Irish club clothing you'd need to go to Belfast, which actually lies in Northern Ireland, so based on your political views you could turn this issue into a very patriotic debate.
In my experience with Belfast club attire, it would be more than reasonable to assume that the average female passerby was, in fact, a hooker. Before you jump on that slanderous stereotype let me point out one key cultural image.
This is a statue of two ladies of the night in the middle of Belfast.
Above you will find a photo of a public monument honoring several especially hardworking trollops. As my cabbie on the Black Cab tour through Belfast put it, "Do you know why there aren't any statues of prostitutes in Dublin? Cause they weren't any good."
In clubs girls wear stiletto heels which are longer than their dresses, and guys wear striped shirts to go with their Jersey Shore battle action. I have never seen heels so tall as those I have seen in Ireland. One time I was having lunch in the main UCD restaurant with some friends and we saw a pack of girls wearing saran wrap like dresses and seven inch heels walk by rattling buckets of loose change. We all concluded that this was probably part of the marketing campaign for the upcoming UCD fashion show. It wasn't. Approaching strangers in constricting outfits and demanding money from them is apparently the most effective way to raise funds for charity. It's good to know feminism has done its work.
I can only wait in apprehension to see if the fashion of Ireland's winter months will reveal a time-fabric trajectory for the spring. As I write this post, my fears are already being validated. I just saw a grown man perform a naked backstroke in the Toxic Lake in front of hundreds of library students with elevated window vantages. But perhaps spring is not arriving as swiftly as I thought. As one student remarked upon viewing the spectacle, "Oof. Must be cold out there."
CRITICAL UPDATE! THE NAKED MAN NOW HAS A FACEBOOK FAN PAGE!
Massive kudos to Joanna Ebejer for finding this.
No comments:
Post a Comment