Colm O'Regan: I agonised over buying Gravity X jeans for so long, they went out of fashion

‪Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

The wheel of life. It just turns, doesn’t it? These days it’s the Big Coat Debate. 

Every morning the Youngest brings to court a complex set of legal arguments about why she shouldn’t have to wear the Big Coat and each morning I am underprepared.

The weather forecast is checked. Damnit, the temperature looks high enough at noon thus exceeding the agreed limits. I’ve lost again. 

But I also lost the morning the canal was ACTUALLY FROZEN OVER. I don’t know what happened. There was a plea bargain that morning. Republicans in the House attached a rider.

I know why she’s insistent, of course. The Second Coat is cooler. My children are cool now. 

I find myself saying nonsensical sentences like, ‘Would you rather be FROZEN than COOL?’ (I sound like Outkast: “What’s cooler than bein’ cool? ICE COLD!”)

I have to whisper about coolness though. Cool is fickle. Mankind has long debated the nature of cool. 

Malcolm Gladwell, the thinker-type person, wrote in 1997 about coolhunters (a spoonerism waiting to happen if ever there was one) who scoured big American cities to find out what the cool kids thought about sneakers.

According to Gladwell the first rule of cool is: “The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on.”

They like their clothes, my children. 

The eldest went out the door today in baggy jeans and a sort of checky lumberjacky coat (courtesy of a Ballincollig charity shop) and a blue woolly hat and… like… I’d wear the sh*t out of that. 

There was a time when we were all wearing checky jackets and baggy jeans.

The only thing my children are missing from emulating my attempts at coolness is the longing. 

A combination of fast fashion prices and very high quality of charity shop clothes has meant they don’t spend ages coveting clothes in shops now.

(To be fair they are six and eight. They are not heading into town by themselves to window-shop, smoke and play one two-hour game of pool. That’s next year. )

They didn’t get coolness from my side. Yes, I went to charity shops but in hindsight, I seem to have spent too much time dressed like someone out of the Young Ones. 

But every so often I bought something cool. But only after a LOT of thought. 

Like the Gravity-X jeans. Black, baggy, cool with a big X written on one of the back pockets. 

These back pockets were way down the legs so that I would be able to retrieve something from them... even while sitting down. 

It’s as if the makers of Gravity X Jeans found getting coins out for the collection at Mass very stressful. 

I lusted after them for weeks, possibly even months. Most days I visited them in the Rave Cave in the English Market. (It’s still there. The Queen should have gone for a Giorgio polo-neck). 

I had missed out on Joe Bloggs Jeans, the Naff Naff jackets and the Sonic Youth T-shirt. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

Gravity X were ‘swanky’ jeans so they would be the most expensive trousers I’d ever bought. Even when I got the money together, I still hesitated. 

I was suffering from chronic FIPPA (Frugality Induced Pre-Purchase Anxiety.) Spending the money but also worried I wasn’t cool enough to wear them.

One day I eventually decided I was.

Unfortunately, I’d agonised for so long that by that stage baggy jeans had gone out of fashion to be replaced by combat trousers and I was left standing outside Coachford disco trying to tuck the now passé baggy trouser-legs into the top of my ‘Mock Marten’ boots.

The cool hunt was over. The prey had vanished.