Colm O'Regan: It's back — the simple combination of a shirt, with a T-shirt inside it
Pictured Irish In And Edian Denis Colm Minihane Cork Columnist Examiner O'regan Picture
“Go on, wear it, it’s fashionable now,” says my wife.
“Fashionable?”
Well that’s not going to sway me. Me and fashionable have had a testy relationship over the years. I just never felt comfortable wearing anything that I was supposed to wear.
I always felt people would be saying “Look at that langer”. So I only wore red trousers once. I always felt like I’d never be one of the people who was a la mode (fashionable, not topped with ice-cream).
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about a fedora here. Or a crop top. Or even red trousers. It’s just the simple combination of a shirt with a T-shirt inside it.
Apparently it’s back. T-shirts inside shirts were the sort of thing Chandler Bing wore. Or Tupac. It was a broad church. It’s slightly unnerving watching fashions return, sometimes twice.
It’s a reminder of the passage of time. Like finding out that the young people you didn’t understand are themselves baffled by the generation that come after them.
The 1980s have been back at least four times. Although it wasn’t the true 1980s. When people wear 1980s clothes now, it’s different. It fits them. They’re not wearing stuff that arrived in a binliner from richer cousins.
Not everything has come back and I wonder why. Is it utility? Do we all regress to the mean and it’s the most boring stuff that survives?
I’m still waiting for combat trousers and camoflage to make a return. They were all the rage in the Dripsey-Coachford-Farran tri-state area.
Twenty John Player Blue in the side pockets for retrieval without standing up.
Going on lonely missions around the dance-floor during the slow set in the deceptive light. Looking for the shift was your own personal Apocalypse Now.
And teamed with Docs of course. Docs never left us. They’re still there. Purchased from McCarthy’s on the Coal Quay.
Note for non-Cork people, the Coal Quay is not an actual quay… well it is, sort of there’s a short bit of quay between two other quays but what’s popularly called the Coal Quay is officially called Cornmarket street. Which was once built on a quayside of a river channel before the river channel was covered over. And it’s pronounced ‘Kay’. I hope that clears that up.
Combat trousers had edged out the baggy jeans and Naf Naf jackets like a grey squirrel chasing the reds off.
The Joe Bloggs were the baggiest – you could shelter a dog in the trouser leg during a rain storm. But maybe they were impractical.
#NafNaf jackets were cheap black jackets that had NAFF CO 54 written on them. And after a while might have had N A CO 4 on them as threads unravelled.
I’m not sure what the 54 was a reference to. Maybe it was Studio 54 in the infamous club. But given where you saw them, it could just have been a bus route.
Sometimes worlds collided. Combat trousers coincided with puffa jackets with suede shoulders. Which I think was called a Guineys jacket.
And also the infamous era of the hooded three-quarter-length leather jacket. Cork teens took the classic leather jacket and said “yes but what if it had a hood and looked like an anorak?”
Combats apart, all of these passed me by. I did buy a leather jacket after much agonising aged 19. But of course it didn’t fit me.
The makers of the jacket had assumed the wearer would have some sort of recognisable chest-like structure below their neck.
So given what we’ve lost, maybe it’s the least I can do to keep memories alive- and wear the damn T-shirt inside the shirt.
