Róisín Ingle on ... going out on a style limb

Every now and then I have an urge for edginess. I'll spot an item online or in a shop, a piece of clothing or an accessory that wouldn't look out of place on the set of 1980s Star Trek, and imagine that the wearing of it will turn me into someone with the fashion cojones of Lady Ga Ga and the colossal coolness of Janelle Monae.

It last happened when I bought a black top with a generous sprinklings of multi-coloured neon studs on the shoulders. “You’ll take someone’s eye out with them,” said at least two people in the pub where I debuted the purchase which was further proof, not that it was needed, that I had once again cracked it at being cutting edge.

It’s true that a few days and a few more similar comments later, I got a kitchen knife and hacked off every one of the multi-coloured studs in my bedroom leaving me with a drawer sprinkled with neon studs and yet another plain black top identical to all the others I own. No matter. For that one night I was a courageous fashion maven standing out from the crowd.

Recently, I was asked to join a panel of judges where tourism products ranging from the Cliff House Hotel in Waterford to the tasting room in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin were being considered for a design in tourism award. Merely being asked to judge a design award induced in me that little frisson you get when finally somebody recognises your innate aesthetic good taste.

I was flattered, frankly. And then when I got to the judging it turned out I was sitting beside Maurice Pratt from Those Ads, which was an unexpected thrill. (Back in the day, children, you couldn’t just fast-forward through the ads, which is what I gleefully do now all the while explaining to my children how they are brainwashing tools designed to convince us to buy things we don’t need while secretly coveting that yellow sideboard I don’t need from Ikea.)

In grey 1980s Ireland you were forced to watch the ads and they counted as serious entertainment. Good old Maurice Pratt with his very good hair, and the way he'd stand in the aisles talking about the price of peas in Quinnsworth (RIP) or the free Kit Kat you'd get with a jar of instant coffee, was a total superstar of that era. But sitting beside him I kept my cool and pretended I didn't even know who he was, sneaking looks at him every so often and muttering "now that's value" to myself. In the end the award went to the truly spectacular Inis Meáin suites in the Aran Islands. All of us cool design heads nodded in agreement and then went off about our cutting edge ways.

There was a fancy dinner planned where the awards would be given out and I decided to go along. But what to wear? Black obviously, it was a design gig so there would be lots of black. But how to make my cutting edge credentials stand out amid this ocean of cool? As soon as I saw the necklace hanging like a piece of sculpture in the shop I knew it was the one. It was white and made from some kind of rubber or latex material. It was structural and directional and obviously the last word in cool.

Of course, I knew it would garner comments but that was kind of the point. “Do you think it’s a bit too, eh, out there?” I asked the shop assistant. “Well, I love it,” he said approvingly. “Do you love it?” “Yes,” I told him. “I really love it”.”Well then who cares what anybody else thinks?”

And so I bought this piece of ‘neck architecture’. I had to pick something up from a constantly cool friend’s flat on the way to the awards. “You look amazing,” she said when she saw me and my necklace. I was glowing by this point, buzzing in that way you do when you know you’ve got everything right in the style stakes.

At the event, every woman seemed to be wearing mostly sequins and I couldn't spot any other neck architecture. It turned out it wasn't so much a design awards as a tourism awards. But as I had helped judged the design part I still thought I'd made the right choice of accessory.

Until a woman at my table approached. “How did you break your arm?” she said with a concerned face, motioning to my necklace. And then during the starter, the woman next to me said she hoped I was ok and that the fracture hadn’t been too painful.

That night I went home and put my cutting edge sling/necklace in the drawer with the multi-coloured neon studs.

I'm thinking that one day, stuck together, they might make something really, really cool and no I don't care, much, what anybody else thinks. roisin@irishtimes.com