An unexpected trend has taken over fashion-forward young men: shorts akin to those worn in the Gaelic Athletic Association (The GAA).
You know the shorts in question: the microscopically short ones with a double side stripe, the kind constantly spotted on Paul Mescal in off-duty paparazzi photos as he cavorts around London. But the trend has now circulated beyond Ireland and the U.K. Popular meme account @randomirish hit up X to say, “Paul Mescal has Gen Z in a chokehold in Brooklyn. The men all look like they play GAA for Mayo now. It's like the early days of Beatlemania here. People don't understand the scale of the colonization." Meanwhile, searches for 'GAA Shorts' in the US jumped by 90% from April to October in the year following Normal People’s release. The shorts were even mocked during Mescal's appearance on SNL. (Even North West was spotted in an O'Neills jersey).
And as far as potential O'Neills spokespeople go (the official makers of GAA shorts), Mescal works. He rose to fame portraying GAA-playing Connell in Normal People, and was a member of the GAA IRL before Hollywood. And Mescal is hyper-aware of his (unwitting?) status as a style influencer. “This is thrilling to me. I love it," he said of the shorts discourse in an interview with Harper's Bazaar. "I don’t know how I would go about my summer if I didn’t have these. I don’t do well in the heat. [O'Neills] are going to get great f**king airtime out of this.” Indeed, O’Neills saw a 20% jump in sales thanks to what has been coined “the Paul Mescal effect.”
What Mescal likely didn’t anticipate was that the humble shorts would infiltrate the ranks of high fashion. In 2020 Gucci released its own pair of GAA-inspired shorts, retailing for over £450. To Ireland’s bemusement, the shorts’ side stripes were in red and green, Mayo’s (a county in Ireland's) GAA colours. Before his meteoric rise to fame, Mescal appeared in a sausages ad set in Country Mayo, so the high fashion endeavour served as an amusing full-circle moment.
But Gucci's unexpected inspo wasn't the first time the GAA graced the fashion world. In 2018, Irish model Oisin Murphy appeared alongside Adwoa Aboah on the pages of Vogue France, in a GAA hurling outfit, shot by famed photographer Alasdair McLellan.
It’s hard to know if the men co-opting the style are channeling the literary it-boy energy, are inspired by Mescal’s emotionally vulnerable portrayal of Connell, or are simply hopping on a trend popularized by Hollywood’s heartthrob of the moment.
But at a time when Irish stars are being celebrated in Hollywood, Guinness is London’s most popular pint, and Kneecap are reclaiming the Irish language, it makes sense that the GAA— a longstanding symbol of Irish nationalism (the British even attempted to suppress it during the colonial rule of Ireland in the early 1900s) would continue to make its mark.
And if you want to try the trend? Mescal usually pairs the shorts with wired earphones and a T-shirt.
Images via Normal People (The BBC) and Gucci
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