When Kate Moss rocked up to the Dior men’s wear show in Paris recently, her hairy black coat worn over a filmy silk dress had the fashion set swooning. A similarly bushy but floor-length number sported by Claudia Winkleman in The Traitors dubbed “the full yeti” reinforced the current trend for shaggy cover-ups.
In Ireland history tells us that heavy woollen capes called shaggy mantles were fashionable for centuries. Being warm, impermeable and practical, they were, in effect, raincoats and once defined Irish identity. Thousands were exported abroad until Irish dress was banned by Henry VIII.
All this came to mind seeing some of the most magnificent and stylish Spanish lambskin coats, capes and curly shearling gilets made by Róisín Gartland in her Pearse Street Tower studio in Dublin, testimony to her outstanding skills and craftsmanship. Modelled here by Olwen Fouéré, the look of these outfits, complete with silver jewellery, crocodile and leather armoury, is warrior queen meets rock’n’roll.
Gartland’s creativity, fuelled with diplomas and degrees in art history, fine art and sculpture, now extends well beyond virtuoso workmanship, her practice encompassing sculpture, painting, bronze casting and other materials.
She is currently one of 12 people selected for pushing the boundaries of traditional practices for a European Marie Curie research project called Somas, which involves her every movement and thought being recorded and filmed as she works. The data collected will be exhibited in Cyprus later this year, “so I am starting on the road of documentation”, she says with a smile.
Having founded the business in 1987, with celebrity fans who included Sean Penn, Bono and Brian Friel, she closed commercial work some years ago, having decided to study fine art.
“I needed to open new pathways and came back to education in my 40s and 50s because I left school very young,” she says. “Fine art was where I wanted to be because for me it’s more expansive than fashion and had the longevity that fashion didn’t have. Leather is very sculptural and comes in many forms, so I came back to it with a whole other perspective. People don’t realise that every piece must be cut by hand, so I started to see my skills as my passport. As long as I could make something that could sell, it would enable me to do everything else.”
Gartland shows me the fur knife she inherited from her father, a Dublin furrier – brass with flexible blades – which like Philip Treacy’s thimble, is the tool of her trade.
“I grew up from a young age watching him work at home and that is where I got the knowledge. I use it all the time and when I put it in my hand I remember myself as a little child standing on tiptoe looking at him cutting into the material and the deftness of his movements.”
Leather, she explains, works in all sorts of different ways to other materials in the way it stretches. “There are areas where it stretches and areas where it doesn’t, so when I am designing I am thinking of the full potential of the material. It has a multiplicity of possibilities,” she says.
She also adds that her leathers and lambskins can be washed. “The secret is to use non-bio powders. Use Woolite for wool or special products like Doterra On Guard, which uses blends of oils on a wool wash – recommended for my leggings. Just never use fabric softener,” she cautions.
She has two studios; one in which she carries out her work, furnished with hides of all types, paper patterns, tools, machinery and worktables; the other, alongside, combines aspects of an art gallery and a shop with exhibition pieces only for display and one-off pieces that can be bought directly from her.
Worth seeing are some of the dramatic outfits she created for the TG4 series on witches in 2022 – one piece, its bodice embellished with silver, was made from white Japanese leather. “We put it into an ancient Irish bog in Connemara and left it there for two years. When I took it out during Covid, it had an earthy colour, creamy beige with [what looked like] three indigo masked figures from plant material – those colours died overnight but from those images I created the stamp [of my brand] of the Triple Goddess.”
Another skirt in ultra-luxurious Japanese hand-dyed indigo leather is mud spattered from being dragged along the floor in Morrigan’s Cave (known as the Cave of Cats) for the series.
Pieces for sale include glossy leather jackets, shaggy pile coats and capes, gilets in supersoft Spanish merino lambskin, curly Toscana sheepskin and vegetable tanned leather. There are leggings, capes, tees, scarves and hoodies as well as smaller affordable items – functional but stylish keyrings, travel bags, cuffs and fingerless gloves. Newly arrived lambskins come in rich burgundy, brown, flame orange and black “and here I am with all these materials, and I can go anywhere with them. It’s a clean slate,” says Gartland, stroking the deep piles.
What she is most enthusiastic about, however, is pirarucu, the skin of a fish native to the Amazon whose large natural scales create a unique, exotic look. “I first came across it at a show in Paris or Milan about seven or eight years ago and fell in love with it. After treatment the soft scale surface of this giant fish is like a honeycomb,” says Gartland.
She has made a specially commissioned dramatic shoulder bag from it with matching leggings for the collector and curator Jobst Graeve, with whom she has collaborated on many out of the ordinary piece including a floor-length black leather cape anchored with silver.
“He delights in the process, and I delight in the process”, she says of their association. Her work on a fish skin mantle was part of the European project.
Fouéré, who displays these pieces with such power, describes Gartland, with whom she has worked on several projects, as “an artist who happens to work with materials and has a practice that is totally part of her. She came into my world and her contribution was extraordinary, full of magic. Her craft, her understanding of materials is deep, and her work, like embossing leather, is so painstaking. She’s like one of those people whose craft goes back to antiquity.”
roisingartland.com Prices on request
Stockists of Gartland’s accessories include Onyx in Blackrock, Granny’s Bottom Drawer in Kinsale and Havana, Donnybrook
