How GAA gear became fashion's most unlikely trend

According to Google Trends, searches for ‘GAA Shorts’ jumped 90pc in the US in 2020. So what’s next for fashion’s most unlikely fashion trend? 

Cork footballer Orla Finn helps launch Ganzee .

For everyone the past year will forever be a marker of a host of mind-boggling events stretching from the blissfully positive to the despairingly negative. But, one thing that had the homogenising effect on Ireland equalised only by a spate of rainy weather was Sally Rooney’s TV adaption of Normal People. The humble GAA kit is an unsuspecting beneficiary of Normal People’s on-screen adaption. But this is not the first time Irish sportswear enjoyed a limelight outside of a soggy, floodlight field.

Cast your mind back to the less complicated world of 2018, Lidl in Tallaght was recovering from an encounter with a JCB during Storm Emma, people queued in droves for mass-produced doughnuts at the opening of Krispy Kreme’s first Irish branch opening, and 17-year-old Japanese student-com-street-style-aficionado paired a pair of Ralph Lauren chinos with a 2002 Irish soccer jersey.