The Aesthetics of Resistance: The role of uniform in the making of the Provisional IRA
Eilidh Duffy, MA History of Design at the V&A/RCA, has recently been awarded the Yarwood Grant for 2024.
My MA thesis investigates the construction of a nationalist paramilitary uniform during the conflict in and about Northern Ireland, colloquially known as ‘the Troubles’. Focusing primarily on the Provisional IRA (PIRA) during the period 1969–1985, this project uses an interdisciplinary methodology to reveal how and why the PIRA’s
uniforms were significant to both its members and the British government.
This project will analyse clothing worn by republican paramilitaries during the conflict, focusing on the PIRA as the most visually documented republican paramilitary group, as well as being an organisation that adopted the sartorial codes of the twentieth century revolutionary soldier as both an identity marker and propaganda tool, placing their goal of independence from Britain symbolically within the category of an anti-imperial struggle. While there have previously been a small number of investigations into the uniforms and material culture of the conflict, there has not been any analysis of PIRA’s uniforms or their methods of constructing a militarised identity. This may be, in part, due to the lack of garments surviving in archives, yet there exists a plethora of photographic evidence that has yet to be utilised.
Most PIRA uniforms were used either in a ceremonial context within urban spaces or for camouflage in the Irish countryside rather than covert operations, with garments adapted from surplus army stocks. This prompts the question: which sartorial codes actually constituted a ‘uniform’, rather than the civilian adoption of cheap, accessible and durable army surplus clothing available at the time? And how was the PIRA’s uniform, which became illegal to wear after the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974, differentiated from casual men’s fashion?
This project analyses the importance of dress to the PIRA’s identity in the context of ceremonial occasions and strategically published images of male fighters that act as propaganda, untangling the codes of dress that constituted this illegal uniform, whilst analysing their uniform and its relationship to men’s fashion at the time. Object analysis of the few surviving garments that constitute a uniform that are currently preserved in public collections, such as the field jacket and black beret in the collection of the Tower Museum in Derry, will be pivotal to interpret these garments’ fugitive nature.
Photographic analysis will be employed to identify specific garments that were adopted from army surplus stocks to uniform the republican body in a militarised context. Close reading of republican periodicals will elucidate the strategic employment of these garments as propaganda by the organisation themselves.
If you would like to know more about our grants, please see our Yarwood Grant page to find out more about this award and how you can apply.
