The Field Jacket Vs Imperialism
How a U.S. military jacket became the uniform of the IRA
As I spend this upcoming season focusing on American surplus, it’s always interesting to see the life that U.S military’s surplus has had overseas, in many different international militaries and paramilitaries.
Here’s one fascinating legacy, unearthed by Eilidh Duffy, a fashion writer and researcher based in London who edits the magazine-turned-substack Bog.
The following is a small part of her research that was presented as a paper at Objects in Distress in June 2024, and will be published in a forthcoming collection by Bloomsbury in 2026. Enjoy!
I am not an American. And I am not a soldier. Yet I have come to identify with a classic piece of U.S. militaria: the M-65 field jacket. If you’re not so nerdy about models and shapes and army codification, it’s essentially the classic American army jacket with a zip away hood that’s been referenced time and again since the 1980s by design teams all over the world.
Yet its timelessness, its classic silhouette and its *Americanness* is not what initially drew me to the M-65. In fact, it had always seemed to me to be a bit too on the hypermasculine side of militaria, adopted a little too widely in the contemporary moment by both bankers and right-wing survivalists for me to really get behind in any meaningful way. Plus, I’ve always found the jacket itself to be surprisingly stiff, its nylon-cotton outer layer a little heavy for my personal taste. That was, until early last year when I went down the rabbit hole of the IrishRebelArchive subreddit.
Let me explain. I grew up in Glasgow, but my dad’s side of the family are from Derry, one of the epicentres of the conflict that is commonly known as ‘the Troubles’. When I was a kid, he wouldn’t talk particularly freely about growing up in what was, essentially, a low-level warzone, other than blurting out the occasional candid detail such as “your grandpa was in the IRA.”
The Provisional Irish Republican Army (more commonly referred to as the IRA) were the most prominent paramilitary active during the near 30 year conflict, formed at the end of 1969 when they split with the Marxist-Leninist ‘Official IRA’ (of which my grandfather was allegedly a member before they split in two) after disagreements about the primacy of armed struggle in their campaign. So for a Catholic teenager growing up in Derry in the 1970s and 1980s, these people were often your friends or family or neighbours – the people you knew from down the street.
Other little facts from my dad (only, until recently, to be parted with after a whisky) might be a bit more shocking, like, “the IRA once used my primary school as a vantage point to shoot at the British Army.” His sense of humour is such that these morsels of detail would never come out of his mouth as a sombre, heavy delivery, but accompanied by peals of laughter. It was, he assures us, “just life”.
Something my dad would do openly and freely though was buy me pieces of army surplus clothing. It’s the only type of dress he ever gets excited about. In an effort to connect with an otherwise temperamental and fashion-obsessed teenage girl, he’d find me strange pieces of old army clothing: flight suit liners double my height, wraparound plastic goggles, misshapen satchels; garments I didn’t realise had a depth of history as objects designed for… well, warfare. To 14-year-old me, it was just fun.
A good decade and a bit later, I had a bit more worldliness to me, and I began researching types of dress used by the IRA. I’d been raking around the internet for photographs of liberation movements wearing ex-British and American military uniforms, having become increasingly interested in how military clothing is developed and, eventually, repurposed by militaries both official and unofficial throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I then realized something pivotal. My dad had grown up at a time when army surplus clothing was worn by a pretty prominent paramilitary…. and yet he’d enjoyed playing with it – as much as I had – as a kind of fashion?! What would start as just a train of thought and a few clicks around the internet would grow into an obsessive year and half long research project and eventually become my Master’s thesis.
So– this is why I was spending a lot of time on the IrishRebelArchive subreddit. Scrolling through the page, I was stopped in my tracks by an image: a small, grainy, coloured photograph showing a Provisional IRA volunteer posing in front of an Irish Tricolour. He's brandishing an assault rifle, wearing the knitted balaclava quite typical of the IRA pulled over his head. But then, on his top half he’s wearing an M-65 jacket:
The balaclava’d man stands like a revolutionary, evoking the French revolutionary icon Marianne, the embodiment of liberty, leading the people to victory. Instead of a flagpole, however, he is holding a weapon, and rather than wearing a white muslin dress, he’s wearing an M-65. Suddenly, to me, the M-65 was an object that was incredibly charged.
By the time I came across this photo, I’d already been researching the use of army surplus clothing by the IRA in the 1970s for a few months (hence my scrolling on the subreddit). Military surplus clothing (often from the British military) was worn during IRA funerals and other commemoration events. Volunteers also wore surplus in their own promotional photographs, published in their own books and newspapers. Often these look and feel (and turn out to probably be) staged, even though they are sometimes credited as a submission from a reader and accompanied by editorializing captions usually describing the scene as some kind of training scenario.
But make no mistake, this photograph that I encountered on reddit is also deliberately posed. This photograph that I found after doing a bit of digging shows another angle on the scene, and makes his posing for the camera even more obvious:
The full context around the image, posed on the 12th of August 1979, is Casement Park, a large sportsground in West Belfast, in the midst of an IRA rally. What this behind the scenes shot reveals, however, is that this volunteer was not dressed up for the sympathetic lens of an IRA-affiliated photographer, but rather for a coterie of international press, who had descended on West Belfast to document an actual real demonstration.
Notably, it would have been near impossible to source an M-65 jacket (never mind the four or five that adorned the bodies of IRA volunteers over the course of the day on which this photo was taken) without a direct plug in the U.S. This use of this M-65, I think, can tell us something valuable about where the IRA were at themselves.
In 1979, they’d had a pretty good year. A large report by the British Government had been leaked which painted a picture of the IRA as a well-structured organization that “has the dedication and the sinews of war to raise violence intermittently…certainly for the foreseeable future.” Then in August, just a couple of weeks after the demonstration shown in the reddit picture, the IRA would assassinate Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, as well as eighteen British soldiers, in a coordinated, one-day attack. This was the British Army’s largest loss of life in one incident during the entire period, and a great success for the IRA. As the historian Daniel Finn has written, the IRA were “in bullish form.”
On the 12th of August 1979, when the march arrived at Casement Park, one of the masked men read out a statement from the IRA, which contextualized their display of arms as “a show of our determination…to resist British imperialism.” Alongside this statement were messages of solidarity from other national liberation groups engaged in armed struggle: the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the South West Africa People's Organization, the Rhodesian Patriotic Front and the Basque ETA. All of whom, it must be noted, at one time or another adopted army surplus clothing as a form of revolutionary uniform.
From a contemporary perspective, though, this jacket does not look so radical. In fact, the M-65 is a type of garment we might think of as a ‘classic’ shape. Clothing so ubiquitous, so prevalent in the modern wardrobe that they feel as though it’s just been there, part of fashion design’s lexicon, since the dawn of time. These garments, however, are not so ancient and not so simple as the term ‘classic’ might suggest. In fact, scratch beneath the surface and you’ll reveal a deep, fascinating and sometimes troubled history.
After its deployment in the twentieth century’s most photographed conflict, the Vietnam War, the M-65 took on a life of its own. The design of U.S. Army clothing was somewhat considered for its aesthetic appeal, so these garments were attractive not just because of what they meant semiotically, but also how they made the body look. During the Vietnam War, when collecting their uniform, soldiers would enter a large warehouse-like quartermaster building whose entrance was framed with the line: “Through these doors pass the world's best-dressed soldiers”.
Through the influence of G.I.s returning from Vietnam, many of whom joined the organisation Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), students involved in the antiwar movement bought fatigues at army surplus stores, thus turning political protests against military intervention overseas into, quite ironically, a sea of military uniforms. Contemporary army uniforms, then, took on a more nuanced meaning within youth culture.
In 1972, sociologists Nathan Joseph and Nicholas Alex termed the use of this kind of dress (wearing a uniform not for warfare, but as a stylistic or political statement) the “anti-uniform”, writing that it was “a mode of mocking the military services and…ultimately an expression of rebellion or rejection of society itself.” The M-65 was used to this effect in costumes for Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver, and Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter. Through these Hollywood renditions of the jacket, the M-65 became synonymous with hyper-masculine representations of the troubled, postwar antihero, representative of a crisis of white, American masculinity.
If we start to think about why the IRA were wearing this jacket at this moment, it tells us something about culture, power and influence. Considering how hard it would have been to get an M-65, the IRA must have deliberately sourced it for this moment, knowing that a volunteer posing in this particular manner would be photographed. And one very important factor is that this garment was American, instantly recognizable to a contemporary audience both in Ireland and overseas as a garment associated with the radical antiwar movement and as an ultra-cool piece of clothing made desirable through Hollywood.
With this one simple-seeming jacket, the IRA was able to address two very different sections of their support base at the same time. The IRA was supported by both dedicated left wing Irish republicans who saw themselves as part of a global insurrection against capitalism and imperialism, as well as a more conservative Irish Catholic and Irish-American audience who made up a large chunk of their funding base (and may well have organized the shipment of jackets to them).
The IRA, on the 12th of August 1979, was sending a message that expertly balanced a very thin line between two very different political ideologies. This man was putting on a show. One quite deliberately draped in the M-65.
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You may already be familiar with this story, but this reminds me of an interview I heard with the actress Sheryl Lee Ralph where she talked about her mother Ivy Ralph, the designer of the Kariba suit. Her mother wanted to design a suit for men who lived in warm climates to replace the European-style suit, but the style became controversial after it was adopted by Fidel Castro and other members of the communist party in Cuba. It’s another fascinating example of how politics affect fashion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kariba_suit
So interesting--I've been delving into the connections between America and the IRA lately thanks to a rerun of Law & Order ("The Troubles")--highly fascinating to see how the M-65 was used here.