Belinda McKeon asks some young fashion designers to explain their work.
The finalists for this year's Nokia Young Fashion Designer Award are a mixed bunch - in all the right ways. Their inspirations range from Dickensian melodrama to Limerick park life, from orchids to manga comics, from Cork street maps to a Guggenheim museum and from New York socialites to Victorian erotica, with Swedish graffiti, Georgia O'Keeffe, skyscrapers and the uniforms of the French Revolution thrown in for good measure. Their influences, as they tackle the competition's central theme of urban glamour, are nothing if not diverse.
Third-level fashion students from all over the country will gather on Tuesday in a basement car park at Dundrum Town Centre to exhibit their collections, and the judges - the designers Peter O'Brien and John Rocha, and the fashion editors Deirdre McQuillan, of this newspaper, and Constance Harris will have to decide who gets the €5,000 first prize.
Deirdre McQuillan is a judge in the Nokia Young Fashion Designer 2005 competition; she returns next week. The winner of the competition will be announced after a show in Dundrum Town Centre next Tuesday.
THE LOOK
The long, slow shots of a rare orchid opening and closing in Spike Jonze's film Adaptation inspired Emma Sheridan's collection Love Hero, an idiosyncratic approach to sportswear. Drawing on the simple, elegant shapes of the flower, she infused basic sports items with puffed-up volume and flow, adding beadwork, draping and batwing sleeves to vests, jackets and shorts in hand-dyed silk. "I wanted to steer clear of the tracksuit look," says Sheridan, who recently completed her degree at the National College of Art and Design and is now a design assistant with the innovative Dublin company L&C Kilkenny.
In Street Sweeties, Limerick Institute of Technology art and design student Mary Claire Kirwan tackled the tracksuit shape head on. Armed with Polaroid snaps taken in city parks, she took the slacker's uniform of oversized street clothing and transformed it into dresses, tops and leggings in luxury silks and satin cottons.
Street culture also provided Orla Bass (Fás, Jervis Street) with imagery to drive her collection, Watch This Space. Fascinated by the street art and graffiti she had seen on a trip to Stockholm, Bass built her collection on a graffiti tag, or signature, and used audacious splattering and spraying effects on skirts and dresses glamorous enough for a black-tie ball. The effect is dramatic, understandably, considering Bass's background in theatre design. (Her touch was evident in the colourful productions of Dublin's Performance Corporation, among others.)
Drawing on artwork, too, is Runaway in the City, the collection of NCAD graduate Máiréad Lee. Lee's main influence is the manga, or comic-book, culture of contemporary Japan. Her dinner jackets, tops and dresses mix manga-style patterns with voluminous draping, pointing towards the conceptual work of Japanese designers but with a practical restraint that renders them very wearable. "In the beginning it's good to do something way-out," says Lee, "but eventually someone is going to have to wear it. So you taper and shape to suit that." With sudden slouches, oversized red bows and interwoven chains, however, her clothes, like those of all the finalists, are far from muted. Several of the students refer to John Galliano and Viktor & Rolf as major influences, and a knowing flamboyance, in both imagery and cut, is the result.
THE FEEL
"This is my first time to work with wool," admits Sarah Verdon of Grafton Academy of Dress Designing, but Gothic Urbana, her collection of dark-hued jackets, skirts, dresses and coats, looks as if it's the work of an experienced hand. Inspired by Victorian costumes and the military uniforms of the French Revolution, Verdon's clothes exhibit a subtle folding and pleating effect, with fabric layered back on itself to create striking texture and volume. The high collars and shadowy colours are less in evidence when Verdon designs outfits for the members of her band, Automata, but the folds, a feature she has made her own, recur there too.
Victoriana is a key influence, too, on the work of Sallynoggin College of Further Education student Allison Connelly, whose collection The Devil's Fancy blends an interesting range of fabrics - Korean and Japanese hide, vintage lace, cotton, silk organza and lengths of fine Italian yarn - in a homage to Victorian erotica and the work of 19th-century photographers such as Félix Moulin. Connelly spent time in Parisian archives and museums, researching her collection's decadent feel, and, like Emma Sheridan, she found a rare flower - this time the devil's flower - to inspire her. Just like its petals, her jackets and trousers can mould themselves into changing shapes when touched.
The handmade lace in Hannah Mullan's arresting collection, Begin Again: Urban Regeneration, also has a history. She found it in the attic of her home, in Derry, and the muslins, wool tweeds and cotton voiles it mixes with all have stories to tell. "I'm interested in using old material in a new way, taking traditional tailoring and messing around with it," says Mullan, a second-year student at Grafton Academy. An unusual influence on her work is the fictional character Miss Havisham, from Dickens's Great Expectations; the idea of "someone sitting around, of decaying old lace, sad and romantic at the same time", feeds into her soft but structured white dresses and the sharp lines of her green tweed jackets.
THE CITIES
Which city is most likely to appear in the entries to a competition with the theme of urban glamour? For John McCormack - the only male finalist - and his fellow Grafton Academy student Suzanne Grogan, the New York state of mind proved impossible to resist. "It's a very energetic, creative city," says Grogan, whose Social Butterfly collection mixes gold and blue silks, 1920s and 1950s shapes, dropped waists and puffball skirts to create a look of sharp elegance.
"People don't need an excuse there to dress up; the social butterfly flutters from coffee to a meeting to dinner with friends. Night and day." Both designers are resistant to the obvious Sex and the City comparison, with McCormack citing the director Sofia Coppola as the type of person likely to wear the clothes from his collection, Urban Rhythms. "Thinking about the theme urban glamour, everyone will automatically think of street culture, streetwear," says McCormack, "but I think, no, we live in a city, and if you look to New York, to the Upper East Side, it's not about streetwear; it's about glamour." The shapes in his collection - loose yet tailored panelled skirts and ruched-up fronts and sleeves - were influenced, too, by the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, with its exaggerated sweeps and curves.
Cork College of Commerce student Joanne de Paor looked closer to home for her ideas of the urban: area maps and street plans from her home city inspired the form and feel of her collection, From Above to Below. "From my sources it was obvious that buildings in a city create a kind of texture," says de Paor (who has established an eponymous label, sold in the Cork boutique Designer Fusion). "So I used knots in the outfits, and a tougher-softer balance between the fabrics, to express that." Her clothes mix delicate tulle with spiky silver edging, flowing green silk and chiffon with symmetrical black lines. An Irish city drives her imagination, and staying in Ireland has become more of a possibility for a young designer, according to de Paor. "I always had it in my head to go away, but it's going really well here," she says. "People have more money, more confidence now, a sense of style, and they want to look good. I wouldn't be too quick to run from that."