'I love making clothes for people': Sinéad O'Dwyer ahead of London Fashion Week show
Sinéad O’Dwyer will feature at London Fashion Week tonight
When Sinéad O’Dwyer first arrived on the scene back in 2018, she had just graduated from the Royal College of Art in London and her designs looked like no other: she rendered plaster casts of different body types in thin fibreglass, and piped them with silicone paint in marble hues. She blurred the lines between fashion and art and peddled a different ideal of beauty, one that fashion had rarely seen before.
Beyond fashion, this was a treaty on body diversity in an industry that famously places the rake-thin, the pale white, and the innocently young on a pedestal and markets that look as the only desirable or viable option.
It’s seven years since O’Dwyer hosted a presentation for the press and buyers. She still runs a small but modest business, designing with women, femmes, and gender non-conforming individuals of diverse body types in mind from East London.
In that time, we have witnessed a global pandemic and a luxury slowdown.
Tonight at her London Fashion Week show held at 180 The Strand, O’Dwyer will illuminate how far she has come as a designer.
It comes the week after she was announced as a nominee for the 2025 LVMH Prize, one of the highest honours for young designers today. The winner receives a €400,000 endowment and a one-year mentorship programme with LVMH-assigned experts.
Previous winners have included Grace Wales Bonner and Simon Porte Jacquemus.
O’Dwyer refuses to reveal the concepts behind the collection but is excited to present the collection that she has been working on for the past six months.
“I’m becoming more confident every season in terms of handling all aspects of show preparation from design to casting. We’re carrying through with newness but also refining elements that have become staples,” she says.
Not your typical runway, O’Dwyer’s sizes range from a UK 4 to 30. This is unheard of for luxury brands in an industry that fetishises the ultra-thin.
In stores, they can run from a UK 6 to 20, though she admits uptake for sizes above 12, outside of private orders, which can go up to size 30, is still slow to take off.
However, the stockists that she counts are among the most sought-after by any emerging brand: Dover Street Market London, Browns, and SSENSE.
The spring/summer 2025 season, which will arrive at selected stores and online soon, evoked the feeling of languorous summer days when evenings bleed into mornings with a sense of reckless abandon and a pervasive sexual tension.
One can expect the O’Dwyer signatures: uniform dressing meets Japanese erotica with a sensual flair.
Alongside her eponymous fitted shirts, in new materials like blue denim, there are shibari-inspired harnesses with short sleeves, micro-culottes with slanted rara ruffles.
There are playful puff dresses in waxed cotton and a fully fledged knitwear line sees distressed styles shine through. A far cry from her beginnings. This is more than an art project but a fashion label with guts and commercial appeal.
Spring/summer 2025 was first presented during Copenhagen Fashion Week last August, as part of a partnership between German retailer Zalando and Copenhagen Fashion Week.
On the runway, held at the verdant Opera Park, there was plus-size supermodel Alva Claire, musician Mahalia, and blind model and broadcaster Lucy Edwards, who walked the show with her assistance dog.
It wasn’t just public figures on the runway.
In addition to some models who were cast on the street by casting director, Emma Mattell, one of the designer’s long-term collaborators, O’Dwyer’s sister Aoise, her wife, the Danish photographer Ottilie Landmark, and her wife’s grandmother, walked the show too.
A month later, the collection was shown at an intimate presentation at London Fashion Week featuring an experimental film by Sharna Osborne who captured behind-the-scenes footage from the brand’s Copenhagen show.
O’Dwyer’s journey to Copenhagen was made possible when she became the recipient of the €50,000 Zalando Visionary Prize, lauded for her refusal to waver to convention and for her commitment to fostering meaningful change by designing, developing and producing clothing for different body sizes, and her dedication to environmentally conscious fashion.
For her part, she is using it to invest in her supply chain and her burgeoning direct-to-consumer business.
It takes a lot to run a small fashion business. Not to mention one that is committed to selling in extended sizes and sustainability.
While she is stocked at a handful of the most exclusive stores in the world, it is partly a reflection of what O’Dwyer and her small team are capable of producing.
When it comes to backing, she can avail of grants from the British Fashion Council’s NewGen initiative which provides a group of young designers access to financial grants, showcasing opportunities at London Fashion Week, and mentorship programmes that help them to build their business infrastructure.
As part of the prize, the designer was paired with Dio Kurazawa, founder of The Bear Scouts. His agency helps brands create products responsibly, offer solutions to supply chain issues, and avoid textile waste.
For any designer, a monetary prize like the Zalando windfall can hugely influence how a small business operates.
Until now, despite the supports she has already received, she admits, it’s been an uphill battle to achieve these things.
“I haven’t been able to invest in things because it’s been kind of a struggle to create collections every season and then put them into production.
“It was what we needed right now: funding and support for continuing to develop what we do and focus on something that doesn’t sit within how luxury fashion currently works. We weren’t able to build that infrastructure before,” she says.
Despite O’Dwyer’s best efforts to offer an expanded size range to a wide audience, she laments that the extended sizing offered at wholesale was reduced from 20 to 18 for autumn/winter 2024. O’Dwyer finds this disheartening but doesn’t dwell on it for a moment.
Last August, she told the Irish Examiner: “When I started I thought that things would happen more quickly in terms of our extended sizing.
“I was harsh on myself if we weren’t growing massively each season in terms of what we could make. Now, I accept that it’s a long game and I’m happy to wait it out.
“I believe that what we’re doing is incredibly important. If that’s not reflected in what stores are buying right now, that’s how it is. But it won’t stop me from continuing to work this way. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the brand that it is.”
O’Dwyer was born in Tullamore, Co Offaly, to Adele and Kevin. Her father, Kevin, is a silversmith, and she remembers her grandmother as a talented knitter.
She attended an all-girls Catholic school, an experience that she telegraphs in her clothing through her fascination with uniform dressing.
From there, she attended ArtEz University of the Arts in Arnhem, The Netherlands, before completing her MA in Fashion Design at the Royal College of Art.
Through fashion, O’Dwyer is crafting a conscious world that not only encompasses different body types but takes its environmental impact into account. Everything is sourced from deadstock or local fabric mills.
“Sustainability is central to what we’re doing. We are careful about what materials and fibres we use and we choose high-quality finishings. These are very high-quality pieces that are made to last.”
But, as O’Dwyer says, the main thing was to have a sustainable business. For a brand that tries to offer as many sizes as it does while using sustainable fabrics, it is not an easy task.
The solution that O’Dwyer has arrived at is a direct-to-consumer capsule of her core pieces that are available over longer windows of time, that are not seasonal, that stand the test of time, and that she is most passionate about. It’s how she plans to use the Zalando Prize.
“The clothes that I’ve worn for the last 10 years have been made that way and that’s what drives me,” she says. In the year ahead, O’Dwyer says, she wants “to be as innovative as possible in every aspect of my business”.
The upcoming LVMH Prize, the eight finalists of which will be chosen in March, would project O’Dwyer to new heights. (Last year, the Irish designer Michael Stewart won the Savoir-Faire Prize, a €200,000 award, that will help him advance his bespoke business.)
Whether she wins or not, O’Dwyer is certain about one thing: “I love what I do: I love making clothes for people. I’ve been doing more bespoke pieces and private orders which makes me really happy.
"The purpose of the work is not only attained by sales but how far the message can go. I want to reach more customers who are part of the community who I’m trying to speak to.”
Having rounded out 2024 with the launch of her debut monograph and a haute couture collection with Jean Paul Gaultier under her belt, Simone Rocha will look ahead to the next decade of her career with her London Fashion Week.
Rocha is reticent to share details about the collection but some things are for sure: For one, the clothing will illuminate the Irish designer’s darkly romantic aesthetic which melds masculine with feminine and strength with fragility.
Likely, it will be presented in the salubrious environs of one of London’s grand institutions. Last season’s show took place at the Old Bailey.
Now in her third year of showing annually at Paris Fashion Week, Róisín Pierce will return to the Irish Embassy to unveil her latest offering on Friday, March 6.
Details of the collection are closely guarded but the turnout at the presentation is likely to outnumber last year’s when Pierce became the first designer from the Republic of Ireland to be listed on the official calendar.
Last year, Pierce garlanded models in smocked, ruched, ruffled, embroidered and crocheted flowers — celestial fare that she has made her signature.
Over the last year, the young designer has worked with Dover Street Market Paris to take her business to the next level: it is now stocked in its New York and Los Angeles stores.
When the 36-year-old Dublin designer Seán McGirr was plucked from obscurity to assume the mantle at one of the most storied fashion houses, Alexander McQueen, his appointment was met with more apprehension than adulation.
However, McGirr proves his pedigree (ex-JW Anderson and Burberry) and stakes a claim to the distinct brand identity that swirls around rigorous tailoring and gothic glamour.
Last September’s spring/summer 2025 show saw him mine his Irish heritage channelling the spirit of the banshee, from Irish folklore, into sharp and twisted tailoring and hand-stitched cobweb lace sewn into silk organza gowns.
His upcoming Paris Fashion Week show will be one to watch as he gets more comfortable with the enormous legacy that precedes him.
There is much speculation surrounding Jonathan Anderson’s upcoming Loewe presentation at Paris Fashion Week on Monday, March 10.
Rumours are swirling in the fashion industry about whether the Northern Irish designer will stand down from his position as artistic director at the 178-year-old Spanish leather goods brand — a role that he has held since 2013 — and join Christian Dior.
Anderson forewent presentations for his eponymous label JW Anderson and Loewe at the recent menswear and womenswear shows in London, Milan, and Paris.
Whatever the outcome may be, his presentation is a must-see, with Anderson producing some of the most compulsively watchable fashion today.
His mastery of craft and creation is like no other, with each season challenging one’s perceptions of fashion.
