“I don’t do things by halves,” says Emma Manley, a determined young Irish fashion designer who has just launched her first collection (pictured) , a sophisticated combination of urban street and evening wear in luxury jersey, wools, chiffon and pigskin.
“I like making something beautiful using tough fabrics. I am not overly feminine, but Manley is quite feminine and quite masculine, a mix of both,” she says. Typical of her style is a black jersey dress embellished with grey and black suede petals, a pigskin skirt studded with rivets, and a sheer navy shirt with mannish collars and cuffs. It has a real signature.
She has come a long way since the days when she caught the bus into Dublin from Castleknock, carrying poles on her back to set up a stall in Cow’s Lane, to her time working on Alexander McQueen’s final collection and making dresses for actress Salma Hayek. But fashion was always her mainstay, having inherited skills from her mother, dress designer Sheila Manley. “I would get in from school and somebody would be in for a fitting and I would watch and think how fascinating it was,” she recalls. After a foundation course in Coláiste Íde in fashion and textiles (where she got an achievement of the year award), Manley landed a job as a style adviser with Topshop.
Later, after further study at the Grafton Academy, she moved to The Loft in Powerscourt “and bigger poles”, selling little Jackie O jackets and velvet coats. Her real experience, however, came in New York with VPL, where a day’s trial led to three months’ work with the luxury company set up by stylist Victoria Bartlett.
On her return, an interview with McQueen in London led to a job – “I suppose because I was nifty with the machine and nifty with the needle . . . I ended up on the embellishing machine – which then had no place in the Manley vision of things,” she says. There, she worked on the designer’s last two collections, “bloody hard work, long days and sleepless nights, but McQueen made me as ambitious as I am to do my own thing. You come out with a different perspective of the industry.”
The day she left McQueen, she started work on her first pieces and eventually moved home, set up her studio, engaged her sister Louise as a business partner and made a cohesive collection. “I strive to create pieces that are different and I want people to look at them and see how you can mix and match them from the simple ones to the more embellished. I am not just a graduate who wants to sell a few frocks. I want to be taken seriously.” emmamanley.com
