'I'm not sure about the aubergine'

DISCOMFORT ZONE:Columnist JOHN WATERSbecomes a fashion correspondent for a day, joining 1,000 women – and three men – at the edge of the catwalk

SOME YEARS ago, a schoolfriend came back after decades on the foreign missions and, after we had talked for an hour, looked me in the eye and said he felt I was missing my destiny by a shade. After the initial irritation, it got me thinking. What might I be if not what I am? This idea soon became a liberation. I would gaze in the mirror into my Armada eyes and wonder if I might come from a long line of toreadors. I tried things out: maybe I should be a composer, an ice skater, a football manager . . . In such a mindset, I have fewer discomfort zones than once I might.

Still, sitting in one of the dozen seats reserved for press at an A-Wear launch for Peter O’Brien’s summer collection in Dublin’s CHQ Building, it is impossible to avoid noticing that I am one of just four men among a thousand women who is not a roadie or a photographer. I share the seating with a dozen older ladies, at the centre of a growing throng, as though trapped within a congregation of exotic birds as dusk falls, the chattering dying away from the edges to allow the elders to speak.

Sitting in the escalating hum of expectation, it strikes me that I am present for a ritual that, like much in our culture, suggests fixed, instant meanings, serving to transport us to a premature knowingness that misses the mystery.

It is 7.30pm and the 1,000 women and four men have gathered around the catwalk/altar. Most of the women are aged between 30 and 50, approximately the target area. A few appear to be in pairs or groups, but many, although interacting, appear to be alone. By far the best-dressed women are the older ladies seated around me. Most of the others are dressed nondescriptly, with only a handful of trouser-suits or other ensembles suggesting a sense of occasion. Most are like the women I see in shopping malls, carrying paper bags with clothes and shoes I always assume must be infinitely more spectacular than what they are wearing.

In one of his writings, pope John Paul II told a pointed story about two priests emerging from a church and being visited by the striding presence of a beautiful woman. One looked instantly away, recoiling from the temptation. The other looked squarely at the woman and even turned to admire her further as she passed. John Paul asked: which priest acted properly? His answer was that each had done the right thing for himself: one, being immature, had rightly avoided the danger of looking at the women in a reductionist way; the other, having arrived at a point where he can see her in all her created beauty, was able correctly to enjoy this fine example of God’s handiwork.

I fear I am going to have similar issues seeing beyond the dancers to the dance of Peter O’Brien’s creations. But the models, although beautiful, are functional abstractions who barely insinuate themselves, though it is impossible not to note their extreme thinness.

Peter O’Brien’s clothes are exceptionally striking in a way I do not expect. The colours are pure, vibrant, but in minor keys: navy and aubergine, and turquoise and duck egg – with and without polka dots – and a pale cream. There are white macs, poplin skirts and chiffons, blouses with bows, two-pieces you can mix and match. I’m not sure about the aubergine, but love the navy and even more the duck egg.

The clothes seem both nostalgic and contemporary, the materials as classy as the designs are classical. I am not surprised to hear O’Brien uses 100 per cent silks and cashmeres. His necklines are high and chaste. He is the same age as I am, and has tired, I intuit, of nothing being left to the imagination. The dearest items are the dresses (€190) and macs (€180); the cheapest, the blouses (€100), and skirts (€120). It doesn’t seem excessive, especially as the styles promise to outlast the recession.

As the garments are walked out, I find myself instantaneously adapting them as costumes for a movie whirling up in my mind. I pan around the female faces and wonder if the same thing is going on for them. Two young women have come to sit on either side of me. On my right is Sharon Keane, who looks like she might lately have been a model, but actually, as Keane Design building and project management, devises shop layouts and interiors. I want to use her as a sounding-board for my tentative theories, but she bashfully declines to be interviewed. She agrees, though, to check my speculations – so if anything of the following is ludicrous, it’s all Keane’s fault.

Fashion is really hope made material. The designer’s gift is an understanding of the dynamics of desire, which concern the expression of harmony with the higher self.

Everything is predicated on sunburst moments poised between the ennui of waiting and the disappointment of realisation. Most women, and increasingly men, spend far more on what they will wear for fleeting periods of enhanced expectation than on what they wear for most of the everyday.

Peter O’Brien says women dress for other women, while Keane, forgetting her refusal to be interviewed, says most women ultimately dress for men. I think, after John Paul II, that both are right and wrong. The objective is not pleasing others but using them as mirrors for our innermost desires, daydreamed out as working scripts for the movies in our minds. I might buy a girlfriend one of Peter O’Brien’s creations, because I think it will become her, yes, but more because I think it will suit my sense of myself, basking in the radiance of her presence.

In return for being my sounding board, I present Keane with a slogan I have been keeping for someone deserving. This, my most up-to-date apprehension of the dynamics of desire, literally came to me watching a TV advert for chocolate. Being some distance from the set, and my Armada eyes not being what they were, I misread the money-shot slogan as “Forgive your happiness”.

When I congratulated the manufacturer, who happens to be a friend, he looked at me blankly and said: “But that’s not what our slogan says.” My Armadas had let me down, but I recognised my error as a given inspiration. It seems to articulate everything I have so far intuited about the moment at which all desire is pitched, though it also, in its intimation of total satisfaction, tells a white (chocolate) lie.

When Keane says my slogan is brilliant, I feel no necessity to be coy. I agree it could be used to sell anything that might fit in the reels of fantasy that roll within human minds, to nudge away the inevitable guilt that derives in part from the price to be disbursed and in part from the memory of previous hopes dissolved. The happiness we seek is always either vaguely ahead or achingly behind, splashes of pure bliss caught only in freeze-framed tableaus we call nostalgia.

I learn that the big sellers in the “pop-up shop” afterwards are the stone macs and the cream lace silk dresses, followed by the turquoise silk ruffle dress – suggesting that the women present are pessimistic about the weather and harbour fantasies that are different from mine. I think as I walk back along the Liffey: so what else is new?