What does a cake or ice-cream sweater look like? How do knitting and baking connect? The answer lies in a playful collection called The Proof is in the Pudding by Joey Fanciulli, one of the 15 NCAD fashion students who will graduate this year. Fanciulli combined a love of baking and memories of the decorative elements of making desserts with his mother and grandmother to “bake” a collection.
Others in this very talented student group bring their own individuality and preoccupations to their work, often informed by family circumstances or heritage. Greta Giardini, who is also a trapeze artist, rendered her collection of wired red shapes based on blood, calling it a dance between blood and motion, “blurring the lines between fashion, performance and emotional artistic expression”.
Tadhg James Geraghty has used his struggles with gender identity for a collection whose warped silhouettes and deliberately incorrect pattern placement are designed to express warring emotions through cloth. Struggles with identity are also to the fore for Ulviye Jarral, whose multicultural background is expressed in a striking collection of shirting used in dramatic ways.
A bell sleeve jacket made entirely in raffia was a standout item in Elspeth Moloney’s collection, paying homage to the women in her life, which features handwork traditionally associated with women, such as crochet, embroidery, smocking and tulle. Family references were also evident in Juliet Webster’s work honouring her west of Ireland ancestry, and in that of Clodagh Leavy who was inspired by her grandmother, the artist Anna Marie Leavy. Leavy has just won the River Island bursary of €3,500 and a three month internship at company’s design studio in London.
Elsewhere, dramatic evening wear and veiling based on the legend of Hag’s Head characterised the collection of Clare native Michael McInerney, while Phoebe Halwax deftly combined lingerie with sportswear. D Connor Petrin’s collection focused on the elegance of dressage, and others on concepts that ranged from contraception to Chinese whispers. Notable was the use of boning, leatherwork, corsetry and voluminous silhouettes.
This group stood out in their diverse conceptual and storytelling ideas, but also in their craftsmanship expressed in so many ways. The core of the Fashion Design programme at NCAD is rooted in Ireland’s textile and craft legacies, encouraged by tutors Natalie B Coleman, Linda Byrne and head of department Angela O’Kelly.
[ Campus couture: NCAD fashion students root collections in autobiographyOpens in new window ]
“Through an ethos of thinking through making, we cultivate designers who challenge conventions” is part of their mission statement.
NCAD images photographed by Sean Jackson; hair by Leonard Daly; make-up by Colette Lacy; models from Ros Model Management.
The NCAD show is on from Friday, June 5th to Saturday, June 14th.
In LSAD in Limerick, 36 fashion students will graduate in June from the new BA course, whose joint programme leaders are Alan Kelly and Linda Quinn. This will be the first graduating year under this new programme and the students will present their collections under four “pathways” – Collection Design, Applied Textiles, Technology and Sustainability.
[ Five fashionable women on their failsafe outfits for summerOpens in new window ]
The students responded to the pathways in various ways in their work. Erin Urquhart used deadstock yarn for a collection called The Red Thread, a tribute to her mother.
Peter Ronan’s six looks drew from Paleolithic cave art with an emphasis on surface detail. Both Emer Glendon’s digitally and physically produced Tidebound, and Roisin Scales’s My Native Shores, looked to home – to hard-wearing fishermen’s clothes and ropes in the case of Glendon, and in Scales’s collection, hand-knitted cardigans made from linen and Irish wool emphasised zero waste and sustainability, offering alternatives to a fast fashion world.
Photographs of LSAD students by Deborah McDonagh.
The LSAD graduates opening show takes place on Saturday, May 31st in the Clare Street Campus, Limerick.
