PRESENT TENSE:IRISH MEN: look down. Not all the way down – just to that impressive expanse that joins your legs to your chest. That protuberance you see there – that several pounds of you that is your pot belly – is cool, writes
SHANE HEGARTY
Yeah, trendy. The bit overlapping your hips is hip. The New York Timessays so. And you thought it was something of little use other than to protect your belt buckle from rusting in a rain shower.
Instead, the Irish belly – jutting outwards before plunging downwards, hilariously out of proportion with skinny Irish legs – is what the hipsters of New York are sporting as this summer’s must-have. You probably thought you’d lost your cool two decades ago. Now you’ve discovered you’re James Dean. All while just sitting around.
“It’s Hip to be Round” declared the paper’s headline, accompanied by a selection of pictures of T-shirted men whose man-bag straps needed to take the long way round their bellies. Some were tastefully accessorised by man boobs.
Anyway, the piece goes on at some length, even giving the "trend" a name, the "Ralph Kramden", after Jackie Gleason's everyman slob in The Honeymooners. "What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago," it claims, the pot belly is to the "hipsters" of now. A "moment" ago? "Hipsters"? Look, I recognise that there's some heavy use of irony going on here, that it's borderline spoof, but it's also the dead days of August and it smacks of irony that is being deployed as a way of protecting itself from the fact that it's semi-serious about this.
It argues, for what it's worth, that men are cultivating bellies as a reaction against the perfection epitomised by the granite-tummied cover boys of Men's Health. Maybe Irish men long ago recognised that. You know, that finally their wives will believe them when they say that letting themselves go is a conscious statement against body fascism.
"Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least it is in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, the McCarren Park Greenmarket and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear," the article continues. Don't make me explain who Grizzly Bears are. This isn't a hipsters' Rough Guide.
Anyway, the New York Times"spotted" this, so it wrote about it and, lo, a trend is born. Or, at least, it is conceived in a sweaty flush of self-pleasure. The pot-belly thing followed not so fast after a piece on "The New Antiquarians", young people who, so says the New York Times, are giving up the clean lines of modern design in favour of filling their houses with the kind of quirky bric-a-brac that their kids will one day pick up, examine carefully and then throw in a skip.
Someone is quoted as saying that “it’s way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past . . . It’s not aspirational and it’s not nostalgic. It’s a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It’s a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world.” So, how many times did you look at the word “spelunking” before you finally registered it and moved on to the rest of the paragraph? (It’s a caving term, but I had to look that up.)
The New York Timesis great for trendspotting. This month, it has also noted a rise in the numbers of people checking their mails before breakfast and that chick-lit heroines are now weathering the economic storm. And if the New York Timessays that sneezing is a trend, the rest of the world catches it.
When, in recent years, you read about metrosexuality or man-dates or some other quirky new trend it is usually because the New York Timeshas mentioned it. (Confession: I wrote about man-dates, the precursors to Bromance.)
Solid trends can be enlightening and fascinating, and this column certainly isn't above a bit of half-baked trendspotting every now and again. But of all the trends, real and bogus, announced in the media, most can likely be traced to a desk somewhere in the New York Timesoffice, which either originated them or picked them up from elsewhere and gave them legitimacy. Even if they don't necessarily stand up to any kind of analysis. In the dead days of August, more than any month, there's a definite trend in "emerging trends". They stick out, indeed, like a belly through a thin T-shirt. Which, I've noticed, is becoming quite a trend in Ireland.