Some fashion labels enjoy sudden success, others gradually develop a sterling reputation. Oakes is one of the latter. Now trading for two years, Niall Tyrell and Donald Brennan's business initially encountered confusion as customers struggled to grasp the concept of customised clothing. Neither ready-to-wear nor couture, it offers women the opportunity to buy items from a seasonal range in which each piece is made for a specific individual. "It's almost like personalised shopping," explains Brennan, or perhaps Tyrell since in relation to work the two tend to speak with one voice. "A lot of people don't realise how well they can look when clothes fit that little extra bit. The majority of our clients are delighted to find they can have an input into what's being made. We talk them through what they're buying, what it's for and where they're going to wear it - and before they know, the whole decision has been made."
Even so, "we go to enormous trouble to explain to people what customised clothing it, and then someone will ask, `when's the next fitting?' " To explain once more, therefore, Oakes provides a service in which clothes from an existing collection are manufactured for each customer. No wonder the company now plans to focus more on ready-to-wear; at least everyone knows exactly what that involves. In future, while tailored pieces will continue to be customised, dresses and separates may be bought on the spot. In part, this decision reflects the company's ambitions to expand into the English market over the next year; trying to liaise with individual clients on the other side of the Irish Sea would simply be too difficult.
"We have the capacity to do more at the moment," explains one of the pair, although expansion abroad ought not to suggest want of work in this country. Oakes has now built up a secure customer base, a typical example of which would be "35, professional, someone who likes her clothes and enjoys feeling good. She wants quality but is not just going for labels. And she comes back to us." Customers return not least because they know the clothes are very well-made and not too showy. Oakes offers a range of fabrics from wool and wool mixes for suiting to silks and viscose blends for separates. Linen will be coming through later in the season; "we introduced it last summer at the last minute and it was really popular, so we thought we'd bring it back again." Always spare, at the moment the Oakes silhouette is also quite brief - skirts tend to be on the short side or, as they prefer to say "there's more bareness." Certain pieces persist through popular demand, among them the frockcoat which "is one of the backbones of every collection because we're always asked for them. There tends to be a formula of one of these jackets with flat-fronted trousers." However, even for fixtures in the Oakes line, certain changes are periodically introduced. "We've just completely redone all our tailored pieces creating new blocks - right down to the little tunic shapes - with adjustments to cut and styling." And it is precisely those adjustments which help to mark the company apart from others. Everywhere else the customer has no say in how a garment is made: at Oakes, customised service means each woman's needs can be taken into account.
Oakes, 8 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, Tel/Fax 01-6704178.