Is it true to say that the clothes maketh the man?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a colleague of mine who – back in his disco days – once had to make the ultimate sacrifice…he could only get into one of Galway’s top nightspots by wearing another man’s pants.

The fact that his denims were considerably more expensive than the slacks – Farah, if memory serves me right – was of no consequence to the door staff.

But they did at least loan him the trousers which were a size or two bigger than required. That meant he had to wear them over his own jeans to stop them from falling down.

The ultimate indignity of all this was that the replacement trousers were actually the property of the nightclub owner himself – the very man who was strictly implementing the ‘no jeans’ rule and then dispensing old pants to ensure no dancers were lost at the door.

In another life and at a different office Christmas party, all of the staff were invited to a rather posh establishment where free food and drink was the order of the evening; this was back when the Celtic Tiger was still a cub.

All staff included everyone from editor down to runners, an honourable age-old post in newspapers for young fellas to learn some trade by spending the first couple of years running errands or delivering post while you bided your time.

As bad luck would have it, this runner wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor was he the sharpest dresser – so there was always likely to be a problem with his torn Adidas trainers if the bouncers spotted them.

Which they did – and the hands went out, followed by the explanation: “Sorry son, no runners.”

The bewildered reply to which: “How did you know what I do?”

You had to dress appropriately to get into nightclubs back in the day – and even if jeans were allowed, the one item of clothing you never wore was white socks.

For some reason, they signified a ruffian element, even though they were harder to keep clean than a hundred pairs of black ones.

And if you really wanted to test the system – or patience of the door staff – then combining white socks with black slip-on shoes, complete with tassels, all rounded off with a nice pair of stone-washed denims, would prove the ultimate test.

Golf Clubs used to be sticklers for this sort of nonsense too – they may still be but I’d sooner hang out at the dentists – and I recall having to borrow a jacket from an elderly club member on one occasion I was invited to lunch in one such establishment.

Many’s the man who was forced to find a tie from lost property that suited his shirt about as much as a holiday in the Vatican would have suited Ian Paisley.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.