Grainne Walsh's new 'classic with a twist' collection for Kilkenny is all funky Fair Isles and non-trad tweeds. Deirdre McQuillan reports
When fashion designer Grainne Walsh was a child, she remembers her father buying her mother a sewing machine and ending up using it himself. "He made clothes for all of us just to show it was possible," she recalls. Fashion has run in her and her two sisters' blood ever since. "We were always making and drawing things at the table while other kids were outside playing."
Today this NCAD fashion graduate designs the Art of Dressing label for Kilkenny, photographed here by her sister Caoilfhlinn, a former assistant to photographers Perry Ogden and Mike Bunn. Her other sister Ciara works for Marc Jacobs in New York "so I get the whole inside track," she says.
Autumn-winter 2005 is her most focused collection to date "more classic with a twist rather than too fussy", with a lot more knitwear and with only subtle and token gestures towards current trends. "We can't compete with high-street prices, and our customers don't follow the catwalk completely, but I think this season has a little bit more of my own handwriting. Each season is a challenge, and autumn is always easier." It is a modest claim for someone who is quietly developing her own signature style in a steady and measured way within a confined brief.
Her skills are noticeable in the way she mixes textures and fabrics combining Lurex tweeds, velvets, silks and fine corduroys in tonal harmony.
In a season where black is having a revival, she has used colour imaginatively and forcefully from fine Liberty print corduroy jackets and chunky Fair Isle knits to elegant steel grey combinations. A clever reworking of her familiar jacket shape in grey herringbone with black velvet ruffles has "just a touch of something historic."
The most expensive fabric is a Spanish hand-embroidered and appliquéd silk tweed in a deep red used in a luxurious full skirt while silk pinstripe crop trousers have the subtle colours of menswear.
Rich in its use of tweed, the collection is ingeniously accessorised with upholstery tassels, but what best expresses her style, she says, is a swing jacket in black wool with multi-coloured fleck worn with culottes and pompom beads. Elsewhere she has given classic shapes a modern edge, most effectively in narrow, silvery tweed coats with 1960s-style bucket necklines.
And, let it rain, for a whole trinity of tweeds "all not matching but tonal" comprising PVC tweed coat, tweed trousers and a tweed silk shirt makes a showery outing a stylish affair.