Cillian Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)
Vitals
Cillian Murphy as Damien O’Donovan, Irish Republican Army soldier
County Cork, Ireland, 1920 through 1921
Film: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Release Date: June 23, 2006
Director: Ken Loach
Costume Designer: Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Last year on March 17, I commemorated St. Patrick’s Day by watching The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a fictional chronicle of two brothers from County Cork during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Cork native Cillian Murphy stars as Damien O’Donovan, who joins a local Irish Republican Army flying column led by his brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney).
The brothers fight alongside each other during the Irish War of Independence, but the circumstances of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and Irish Free State deepen the divide between the increasingly radical Damien and more pragmatic Teddy as the two find themselves on opposing sides of the subsequent Irish Civil War.
Filmed on location in County Cork (where I can also trace much of my own Irish heritage), The Wind That Shakes the Barley premiered and received the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Widely released a month later, the movie set a record as the highest-grossing Irish-made independent film and remains director Ken Loach’s biggest box office success to date.
What’d He Wear?
Green has a centuries-old significance in Irish history and culture, most clearly due to the Emerald Isle’s lush landscapes but also in revolutionary contexts. The color was adopted by the Society of United Irishmen revolting against British rule in the 1790s, evolving from usage in earlier periods like the Catholic-led Irish Rebellion of 1641, and it remains an iconic symbol of Irish nationalism and identity.
Thus, it feels appropriate that Damien sports a hardy sport jacket woven from an olive-green herringbone Irish tweed through much of his participation in Teddy’s IRA brigade during the Anglo-Irish War. This single-breasted jacket has a high-fastening four-button front, with the notch lapels rolling over the top button for a 4/3-roll. The lapels are reinforced with sporty swelled edges. The jacket has a slightly slanted welted breast pocket and set-in hip pockets, deep enough for Damien to frequently stuff his flat cap.
The shoulders are padded and roped at the sleeve-heads, with seams curving slightly inward and down from the rear armholes to align with the short and relatively closely spaced double vents on the back of the jacket. The three-button cuffs at the end of each sleeve are reinforced by banded seams.
On the back of Teddy’s tweed jacket, seams curve slightly down from each armhole to align with the short double vents, which are spaced closer together than on conventional double-vented jackets. The vertical seam down the center of the back is also starting to pull apart, likely due to months of hard wear including combat and incarceration.
When joining the IRA brigade up through his arrest, Damien wears a white cotton neckband shirt, though he foregoes attaching a collar. He wears the front placket fully buttoned, including a brass stud to close the shirt over his neck. The shirt has double (French) cuffs that he closes with oval-shaped pearl-faced gold-toned links.
Damien always layers his jacket over a brown waistcoat (vest) with a cable-knit wool front, presenting like a tailored sleeveless cardigan. The waistcoat has five mixed brown four-hole buttons up the front, with the bottom one or two typically left undone over the notched bottom, and four welted pockets. Contrasting with the cable-knit front, the back is covered in an iridescent dark Bemberg with a matching adjustable strap across the bottom, similar to tailored waistcoats that accompany a matching suit. This waistcoat is seen in great detail during his final scene, when Damien wears it with a white neckband shirt and dark-brown striped suit trousers.
After his escape from captivity, Damien changes into a light-blue cotton shirt with a fancy arrangement of stripes that alternates between solid pale-blue stripes and pale-blue stripes bisected by a narrow mid-blue stripe. The shirt is otherwise designed identical to his white shirt, with a front placket, double cuffs, and a neckband that he wears sans collar—and, in this case, without a front stud.
By 1921, Damien switches to shirts with attached collars. Though now the ubiquitous style, men’s shirts with attached collars were still relatively new by the early 1920s, though they were growing increasingly popular thanks to mass production by Cluett, Peabody & Co., the Troy, New York-based shirtmaker behind the contemporary “Arrow Collar Man” campaign.
This cotton shirt is busily patterned with a light-blue ground of mini geometric chevrons, overlaid in a white windowpane check. The vertical white stripes of this check are shadowed along the right side with dark-navy and lilac broken-stitched stripes. In addition to the long-pointed spread collar, the shirt design differs from his neck-band shirts with its plain button-up front and button cuffs.
Damien wears brown windowpane herringbone woolen flannel trousers, orphaned from the three-piece suit he wore for the brief scene depicting his induction to Teddy’s IRA brigade. The flat-front trousers have a long rise that keeps the waistband covered by his waistcoat. Like many contemporary trousers meant to be worn with suspenders (braces), these have a split “fishtail” back. There are on-seam side pockets but no back pockets, and the bottoms are plain-hemmed.
Damien wears weathered black calf leather derby-laced combat boots with hard leather soles.
Like many of his fellow IRA members, Damien wears a tweed flat cap—a style so deeply connected to the nation that some refer to it as an “Irish cap”. Damien cycles through a few flat caps over the course of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, though he always wears one made from a rich brown tweed with this particular jacket.
Wristwatches were growing more common for men during the years following World War I, when they were being worn increasingly on the battlefield by all sides of the conflict. Damien wears a steel field watch like those favored by militaries through the first half of the 20th century, detailed simply with luminous hour indices against a black dial and secured to his left wrist on a brown leather strap.
The Gun
Damien carries a Webley Mk IV revolver as his primary sidearm. Produced from 1899 to 1913, this British break-top service revolver earned the nickname “Boer War Model” due to its widespread use during the Second Boer War alongside the Mauser C96 and Beaumont-Adams revolvers. The Webley Mk IV features a traditional double/single-action trigger and operates with a self-extracting mechanism—when the top is “broken””open, the extractor automatically ejects the spent cartridges and allows the user to load six fresh rounds.
The Webley revolver series dates back to the Mk I, introduced in 1887 with the proprietary .455 Webley cartridge. Over the next quarter-century, the design underwent five major revisions before the Mk VI was adopted for British service during World War I. Though production of .455 Webley revolvers ended in the 1920s, they remained in service through World War II due to vast stockpiles and the military’s familiarity with the reliable weapon.
Cillian Murphy would later wield another .455 Webley break-top revolver as Birmingham gangster Thomas Shelby across the first three seasons of Peaky Blinders, though Tommy preferred the later, longer-barreled Webley Mk VI.
How to Get the Look
Cillian Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)
Though his neckband shirts date the outfit to the years immediately following World War I, Damien’s go-to outfit of an olive tweed sports coat, knit-front waistcoat, and tweed flat cap remain timeless and fashionably rugged staples of Irish sartorial heritage a century after The Wind That Shakes the Barley is set.
- Olive-green herringbone tweed 4/3-button sport jacket with notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight hip pockets, set-apart 3-button cuffs, and short double vents
- White or light-blue striped cotton neckband shirt with front placket and double/French cuffs
- Brown cable-knit wool single-breasted 5-button waistcoat with four welted pockets, notched bottom, and dark Bemberg-lined back with adjustable strap
- Brown windowpane herringbone flannel flat-front suit trousers with on-seam side pockets, fishtail back, and plain-hemmed bottoms
- Black calf leather derby-laced combat boots
- Brown tweed flat cap
- Steel field watch with black dial (with luminous hour indices) on brown leather strap
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
The Quote
I hope this Ireland we’re fightin’ for is worth it.
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