Dressing Eshay

Overview

Eshays are often the butt of the joke in Australian media. This lighthearted documentary seeks to tell a different, more nuanced story about this quintessentially Australian identity. Building on vox pops – including with a self-identified eshay and two older men who were sharpies in the 1970s – director/presenter Niamh tries to get a grip on what this subculture is and where it came from. Weaving together personal, historical and social threads, Dressing Eshay culminates in Niamh’s own sartorial transformation – an experiment to see whether ‘dressing eshay’ will change her own demeanour. In the process, she explores themes of class, disadvantage and ‘coolness’, and how clothing can function as armour to both protect the wearer and signal their identity to the world.