Photo by The Sartorialist.

There are days when you feel restless and annoyed, unsure of yourself and bored with everything. Nothing is right. Everything is limp. The brain feels overstretched and chewed over, like a discarded piece of chewing gum stuck to the sole of your shoe. I call those days ‘Sundays’.

Sundays are made for couples – providing, of course, that they both have the same opinion on football. If you’re single, Sundays are usually made for the television.

In moments of laziness and indecision, it’s often a good idea to pop the TV on. The Spurs match not being entirely enticing, I flicked onto the hard drive to see what treasures were stored there. A Beyonce documentary (nah), Gone With The Wind (tempting, but too long) and three BBC4 documentaries about women’s issues (that I doubt I’d process very well after a glass or two of wine). As you can tell, I live in a very pro-woman household – that or someone spontaneously deleted all my brother’s carefully recorded episodes of Family Guy and American Dad again.

Whoops.

I ended up watching ‘Bill Cunningham New York’, a lovely feelgood documentary about the well-respected New York Times street style photographer. It’s a study in integrity, passion and the insane capacity for knowledge that a love of fashion – indeed any art or craft – can inspire. If you have not watched it, I beg you to go and do so. Even if the thought of fashion trends makes you want to vomit, watch it. Even if you’re only using this page to clear up dog poop (I applaud you for recycling, I really do) and this sentence manages to catch your eye, watch it. You will not regret it. Put the paper in the bin first though. Or frame it. Whatever, I’m not bothered.

Bill Cunningham is one of those rare important people in the fashion industry who simply reports style instead of dictating it. Every day, he puts on his cheap blue smock, loads his camera with film and cycles the street of new York on his Schwinn, looking for something beautiful to photograph.
In ‘Bill on Bill’, a rare autobiographical piece that Cunningham wrote in 2002, he said, “Back in the 60′s, I remember that Eleanor Nangle and I were sitting at one of Oscar de la Renta’s first shows in New York when she heard antiwar protesters down in the street. She said: “Come on, Bill, we’re leaving. The action isn’t here.”" We got up and skipped out of the show. I knew from photographing people on the streets that the news was not in the showrooms. It was on the streets.”

This was written a full ten years before street style blew up – some might say right in our faces. And yet, whether you are aware of street style or not, Bill Cunningham remains, unchanging. He’s one of the most important chroniclers of our time, and has been for several decades. He’s a burst of warm sunshine – the perfect person to get to know on a self-conscious Sunday.

…Rebel Rock in the Underground Press, 1968-1980, compiled by Vincent Berniére and Marcel Primois.

Punk Press, much like punk style, doesn’t demand reading, but it does demand intense, concentrated looking. Really look at it. Get into all the cracks and crevices. Weed out the dirt and the anger. Look at how easy it can be to get something out of almost nothing.

Comprising full page facsimiles of the most noted international punk magazines and ‘zines, Punk Press is a must for anyone even remotely interested in the genuine aesthetic and NOT what everyone was wearing at the little ol’ Met Ball (mostly boring – though props go to Giovanna Battaglia and her safety pin crown).

It’s the best in punk style, music and art, with the famous (Linder Sterling’s provocative Buzzcocks collages) to the slightly obscure (Loulou Picasso’s Soviet nods for French magazine series Libération) featuring.

A friend and I spent a few hours looking through the pages and dreaming about how we could make our own ‘zine. You can take that as a good sign – I rarely get inspired to actually ‘do’ something unless pizza or red wine is the end result. Such is the impact of Punk Press, or indeed, the punk presses at large.

Punk Press is published by Abrams and is out now.

Nevertheless, I have been known to hit the gym from time to time; mostly with my hands and feet and mostly out of frustration with the elliptical death machine, but I get it. It’s nice to look nice. It’s normal to want to look nice all the time – even at the gym. Each to their own within their own boundaries.

In a way it’s great that in Ireland, we don’t have the gym culture that our friends over the pond in America do – in which there is the ever-hovering possibility that a man will ask you out. In Ireland, asking a person out at the gym is about at socially acceptable as asking someone out by barging into the women’s bathroom and shouting at her, mid-flow, right through the closed cubicle door.

Still, we have a trickle down effect, in which women simply must look good at the gym. Unfortunately, I never got that memo. My time at the gym was mostly spent powerwalking remorselessly on the treadmill and concentrating fiercely on a double dose of Jeremy Kyle and Oprah, dressed in Penneys leggings, a baggy, probably related to Arsenal in some way t-shirt and shoes with the requisite amount of arch support. I may have looked like a crazy lady. I didn’t really care. Once, I started crying at the gym – but they had Michael Jackson’s memorial on the television, so that was ok.

I’m not a fan of looking sexy at the gym. When you work out, you perspire,. When you perspire, you look messy. It’s a simple fact of life. Women (and men for that matter) are not programmed to look good most of the time. We’re complex biological beings that are capable of amazing things, much more amazing that finding the perfect sweat-proof mascara.

When you exercise, make sure to wear breathable fabrics. It will make your existence so much more convenient. Wear make-up, don’t wear make-up – it’s up to you. Just be aware of the repercussions. If grooming affects your training because you’re too busy worrying about how you look, maybe it’s best not to be groomed.

Despite what I’ve just said, I’m not anti-fashion at the gym, I’m anti-inconvenience. Gym clothes are designed to make life easier, not to make you look like an object of desire or jealousy. Stylish gym gear is great. Stylish street gear is probably not so great. Be responsible and be yourself, and if you do decide to wear make-up at the gym, for the love of the gym gods, don’t wear a white top. Trust me.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about various things. This is good because a) if I didn’t, then the space where this column usually goes would be occupied by a picture of me shrugging and b) if I didn’t have any brain activity, I would most likely be a dead person – and I’ve heard that’s not much fun.

This week’s thought space has been disproportionately concerned with tattoos. Tattoos have been around for thousands of years, existing in almost as many social contexts. Only recently has the tattoo been floated as a fashion statement, despite that fact that only clothes and tattoos are specifically designed to be worn on the body.

Is a tattoo a valid fashion statement? My first reaction is no. When it comes down to it, fashion is fleeting and temporary; it exists in a series of moments, preserved only when there is a pen or a camera around to capture it. A tattoo is much more personal – and much more permanent.

I’ve been thinking about getting one particular tattoo for about five years. It’s a book illustration, very small and very personal. I know where I want it to go. I know who I want to do it.

I can never find the motivation to book it.

People wear clothes to express who they are, but tattoos express the essence of a person. While an outfit says a lot about a person’s occupation, values, likes, dislikes and social status, the tattoo tells a story often burdened with feeling (I am now remembering, shamefully, asking a man I had just met what his tattoo meant, only to have him dissolve into tears over the death of a loved one).

A tattoo is a personal statement, not a fashion statement. It’s a shame that the underlying reason people give for not liking the tattoos on other people is because ‘it looks cheap’. It’s an amazing world we live in, when we are raised not to judge people on how they naturally look, but make blithe assumptions of a lack of class when we consider a change in look that a person has planned his or herself.

A tattoo is ownership. It is a person assuming autonomy over her body. Because tattoos are so personal, they transcend notions of class or taste. A tattoo belongs only to the person whose skin bear its marks. A person who passes judgement on the tattoos of others passes it in an invalid way. It won’t hold up in court.

A good friend of mine has been itching to get a tattoo on her chest. On first telling me this, my face immediately scrunched up into confusion and distaste. ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’ I wondered.

Then, of course, I realised that it didn’t really matter. Not my chest, not my place to stick my oar in. Ink will not change a person. The mark that can do that, you can’t see on the skin.

Looking out at Pause Play Vintage

You wouldn’t want to be a small business owner at the best of times, but then again, this isn’t really the best of times we’re having. Businesses are closing left, right, centre and left and right of centre. The youth are draining away, using their creativity and liberal use of graft in other countries, and the news shows multiple accounts of boarded up buildings as a kind of shorthand in every report that involves the word ‘revenue’, ‘emigration’ or ‘rural’.

It’s funny really. Recently, there was a news report on my hometown, Tralee. It showed the boards, the shops (or lack thereof) and the depressed Yoof. Gotta love that depressed Yoof.

And yet. Three new businesses have opened in Tralee this week. One of them is a vintage clothing shop called Pause Play Vintage, in which I am typing this while the owner Dominique goes out to buy some lunch. I don’t work here, by the way. I just nipped in to have a look and ended up staying for a few hours chatting. It’s one of those idiosyncratic shops that one only finds in a small town, in a fog of community that rarely settles on larger bodies. Of course, the big temptation to this shop is the fact that there are clothes in it. I also may really be annoying Dominique by commandeering her laptop and getting bun crumbs all over the keyboard.

Vintage first became a worldwide phenomenon when Julia Roberts turned up to the Oscars in a vintage Valentino dress to collect her Best Actress gong for Erin Brockovich. In the simple black gown with white accents, Roberts took on a columnar, statuesque form herself. Between that and Kate Moss (and what more is there to say about Kate and vintage?) it has taken over with a force that can carpet towns best known for their Penney’s substance abuse problems.

It really is a lovely store – and again, I don’t work here or have any affiliations with the shop – all whitewashed freshness, taxidermy and candy-coloured stock; a virtually perfect mix of unselfconscious kitsch and cool.

We need more shops like this in Ireland. Scratch that, we need more shops like this in Cork. If you are in Cork city and in need of some vintage loving, I heartily encourage you to check out Miss Daisy Blue in The English Market and Mercury Goes Retrograde, which is just at the back of the Savoy Centre. Both are small businesses powered by love, knowledge, hard work and some seriously amazing vintage stock.

Support local businesses if you can. Support local fashion if you can. It is such an important thing to get involved with your community. At least see it like this; you couldn’t stroll into Debenham’s and borrow the manager’s laptop, only to have your writing efforts rewarded with a freshly-baked bun. Think about it.

The Cos Autumn/Winter press day is a rare spot of serenity in an otherwise chaotic round of go-sees which can get slightly monotonous – you never think that a cupcake can jade you until you eat that one cupcake too many.

The Marker Hotel in Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock area was a echo of the clothes on display – carefully considered, an interesting synthesis of construction and cultivation, the varied greens of nature and the muzzy grey of concrete. Calm and cool.

Favourites included a semi-sheer white shirt dress made for layering under a deep-v denim mini dress, seamless brown women’s brogues, a stiff-fabric grey dress tailored like a scuba suit, another semi-sheer – this time a black calf length skirt – and almost every black textured pullover from the men’s section. As the collection is based on elements of nature, it’s fitting that every separate element is made even better when paired with another. It is tailor made for layering.

The creative industry most conducive to admiration and copycat-ism is the music industry. To want to look like a writer is to want to look like you fell headfirst into a skip. To want to look like a film star is to want to look totally homogenous and inoffensive. To look like a musician is also to look like you fell into a skip to an extent, but a skip out the back of The Coolest Store In The World.

Musicians; they just get it. Successful musicians know, and are sometimes saddened by this, that image plays the most vital part in getting yourself noticed. Image is everything. It is sadly most definitely the case with the majority of young female singers. However, it is nice to see how many female artists now subvert the conventional cute’n’sexy kitten look for something garish, weird, intimidating or slightly smelly – all of which, not encouragingly, can still translate to short, tight and sparkly under a different guise.

It’s with this in mind that we turn to Saint Laurent Paris. The rebranded French fashion house, once called Yves Saint Laurent, is now headed by designer Hedi Slimane. Slimane has a habit of using musicians as muses. His first advertising campaign is no different but still manages to buck the trend for the marriage of fashion and music – the campaign features Marilyn Manson, not-a-household-name Ariel Pink, Courtney Love and Kim Gordon, bassist and guitarist for Sonic Youth.

Both the women featured in the campaign are of a certain age (in Gordon’s case, over fifty) and they look great. They look even better than the average model despite – or in my opinion, because of – their age. Grunge fans will know Love for more than just her ripped babydolls and smeared makeup aesthetic, while as well as a musician Gordon has become the understated style icon for fans of understated cool (Chloe Sevigny and Sofia Coppola both modeled for her clothing line, X-Girl, when it debuted in the early Nineties).

From MIA to The Dumdum Girls to Florence to Kim Gordon, what makes musicians so cool? I don’t think it’s the music; I think that it’s because they don’t care too much. Musicians who have the weight of stylists and record companies behind them never look too well. We just need to watch an episode of The Big Reunion to remember that.

Tralee is the kind of town that, due in part to recession and a dwindling youth population, just doesn’t get to have Nice Things. The whitewashed Pause Play Vintage, tucked away on Milk Market Lane, is such a very nice thing. The space is spread out over two floors with a carefully-thought out selection of vintage clothes, accessories and bric a brac over two floors.

Last weekend the family went to Belfast. Highlights included food in Made in Belfast and Alley Cat, the cheapy cheap euro to sterling rate in Topshop and the Andy Warhol retrospective in The Mac, to which I dragged my mother and little brother – in his case a little literal dragging was needed.

The Mac is a lovely arts venue, but to call this a retrospective is a bit of a misnomer – there just aren’t enough major works in too small a space to make it a real reflection of the prolific Warhol. It’s really more of a sampling. However, the exhibition is totally free, so if you’re in the area before the 28th of April, when the exhibition ends, it’s more than worth a look. They’ve got great merchandise too (she said, sipping tea from her new Warhol cow print mug).

Mine’s the Date Bait. Pic via Bad Postcards Tumblr

There are deep and meaningful personal epiphanies, and then there are epiphanies that only happen when you get a new haircut.

I never used to go to the hairdresser. In UCC, I would go to a now-closed hairdressing college off Patrick’s Street and avail of the twenty euro special, with resulted in fringed bobs of a different variety every six weeks ranging in quality and execution from Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction to Darina Allen in the early Nineties.

After college, I cut my own hair. The nail scissors was upgraded to fringe level and everyone was happy with my look, especially me. With the perfect, lens-free vision of hindsight, I can now see that I looked quite scruffy (this is putting it kindly). At least I wore that look with conviction – and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that either distracted or grew attention to that week’s accidental asymmetric fringe monstrosity.

I hated going to the hairdressers. I hated getting layers – to me it looked like someone cutting a shelf into your head. I now realise that I was thinking that because I was just going to crap hairstylists who didn’t particularly care about whether my ‘do looked good or not. It took getting a well-considered haircut with actual layers to realise that all those bad hairdressers really were cutting elaborate shelving units into my gruaig.

There’s good and bad in every profession. Bad hairstylists won’t care about you if you don’t care about yourself, and at that time I could have been bald and only given a toss if it was cold outside and couldn’t find a woolly hat.

This all changed about a year ago when a very wise person had the brainwave of putting me in front of a camera, asking me to present a fashion video. On a whim (and because I knew my mother would be watching), I made an appointment at Sobe Brown, which I was assured was the very best in the city, and got a haircut that most assuredly did not cost twenty euro.

And I haven’t gone anywhere else since.

A good hairstylist will know exactly what you want no matter how badly you articulate and Aisling (I don’t mind divulging) knew what I wanted when I came in with about twenty pictures of Brigitte Bardot, saying ”I want something like this… but also not like this at all”.

There is a transformative power in a good haircut. Yesterday, while I was getting a trim that somehow changed my face, my best friend was getting the Big One. The pixie crop. I am happy to report that she looks like the perfect synthesis of Lena Dunham and Frankie from The Saturdays. She looks like a totally different person, but still just as beautiful as she was before all her hair was lopped off.

The best haircuts are the ones that make you look like you’ve had great hair forever – not like you’ve just had a haircut. The best haircuts make a person look like the best version of him or herself.

It’s something to consider investing in – because if you don’t invest in yourself, who will?