All products featured on GQ are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Paul Mescal’s big Hollywood breakthrough was his role in the 2020 Sally Rooney-adapted series Normal People. But the Irish actor’s big internet boyfriend breakthrough happened later that year, when a paparazzi photo surfaced of him wearing a loud Adidas windbreaker and a pair of micro athletic shorts. Mescal was running a very laddish errand in London, as evidenced by the bag of Walker’s prawn-flavored potato chips, bottle of cider, and two cans of premixed gin cocktails he clutched in both hands. As the Mirror reported alongside the photo, an online commenter wrote: “He’s a bloody dream.”
This happens every so often now—a photo of Mescal, displaying his muscular thighs in a pair of O’Neills or Umbro athletic shorts, going viral on the internet. Before acting, Mescal played minor-league Gaelic football back in his native Ireland, which required him to wear these sorts of shorts all the time: “The short shorts that I wear, they’re actually not short shorts,” he told GQ last year. “They’re just football shorts that I’ve worn for my entire life.” It’s even become a common interview topic for Mescal, who was asked about his collection of O’Neills micro-shorts in a recent Harper's Bazaar story and seemed tickled that the century-old Irish sporting goods company was “going to get great fuckin’ airtime out of this.”
It happened again this week, with a new photo of Mescal in London wearing his tried-and-true black O’Neills workout shorts. This time, he paired them with an Aimé Leon Dore-branded Mets cap, well-worn Adidas Gazelles, and a merch hoodie repping the beloved bedroom-pop star Clairo. As such, the $70 “Clairo Dog Hoodie” is now sold out on the artist’s website. (This garment introduces another point of intrigue here, which is that Mescal previously dated indie superstar Phoebe Bridgers, with whom Clairo shares a musical milieu.) The sweatshirt features an illustration of a fluffy bichon frisé wearing over-ear headphones; Mescal himself was wearing headphones, too, of the “hot girl” wired variety.
By the sum of its parts, Mescal’s very normal outfit is a masterclass in the art of the sluttiest thing a man can do, insofar as wearing an amalgam of internet winks (horny athleisure, indie-pop merchandise, divisively commonplace footwear and/or personal audio equipment) will induce a lot of online tongue-wagging. “Teardrop quads out with the Clairo hoodie,” GQ columnist Chris Black wrote alongside a photo of the actor. “This man is a pro.” (Meanwhile, GQ’s senior web producer and resident thighmaster Gabe Conte chimed in with a personal peccadillo: “I look like this btw.”) Though not everyone can be Paul Mescal, anyone can dress like an internet boyfriend. Even you.
