Must tweed always be a scratchy, hairy fabric? Need corduroy be tough and unyielding? Is knitwear in this country synonymous with coarse, all-enveloping sweaters? The answer to all these questions, at least when provided by Irish menswear designer Pat McCarthy, is most definitely no.
Now comfortably settled into his market after more than three years in business, McCarthy offers his customers updated tradition. That means familiar materials such as the aforementioned tweed and corduroy but in a more relaxed form and fresh colour combinations. It also means taking basic shapes and giving them a contemporary tweak.
Radical has never been a description of either McCarthy or his clientele. The latter are men who want the tried and tested but with a certain awareness of what has happened to fashion in the past few years. So, the fabrics are lighter and softer than their predecessors; tweed is less hairy, knitwear - thanks to the inclusion of fibres such as alpaca - quite definitely less rough against the skin. The outline too has loosened somewhat, becoming gentler and less defined.
Nonetheless, the sense of belonging to a long and honourable tradition is evident in the latest McCarthy collection for autumn/ winter, as it has been in every previous range. What this designer provides is change at its most imperceptible since most men, where clothing is concerned, are not interested in radical shifts of taste. They want to take advantage of this decade's technological advantages in fabric manufacture - hence the new lightness of weight and touch - without altering shape to any great extent. How each customer chooses to wear McCarthy is quite another matter, and the range is sufficiently wide to allow considerable variation in approach. The primary difference lies in layering; the nature of these clothes means as many or as few of them can be worn over one another as the individual desires. It could be just a sweater and a pair of slouchy trousers, or possibly a generous build-up of shirt, waistcoat, loose over-shirt, soft-shouldered jacket and then coat.
Whatever the option, the overall impression will be of relaxed comfort. Although McCarthy provides suiting in his collections, these will invariably seem more at home in a rural than urban setting. His clothes suit casual more than formal occasions, finding their place among weekend pleasures rather than weekday business meetings. In part, this arises through McCarthy's fabric selection, in part thanks to his preferred palette. Inspired by the paintings of Sean Scully, this season he has focused on broad blocks of tonal brown, grey and blue, relieved by splashes of bolder colour such as lemon and red.
Later this autumn, McCarthy will be producing a line of suits in velvet with complementary shirts in rich shot shades, all of them suitable for winter evenings. Once again, the focus will be on comfort and ease because those are the qualities he has made quite distinctively his own. And in today's stress-laden environment, they are qualities of considerable merit and value.
If these costumes look familiar, that is because they have appeared in an advertising campaign for English carpet manufacturers Brinton of Kidderminster. Designed by Vivienne Westwood using examples of Brinton's carpet, the clothes are on display in Abbeyleix Heritage House, Co Laois until next Sunday; they are based on court dress from the 1780s when the company first started production.
Abbeyleix itself was a centre of carpet manufacture earlier this century as a factory was established in the town in 1904; among other orders, it made carpets for the Titanic in 1911, using looms which had come from Brinton's.
