A new generation is updating traditional Irish knitwear . Deirdre McQuillanspoke to some of the country's up-and-coming designers as well as established players
LUCY DOWNES: CLEAN LINES IN CASHMERE
Lucy Downes set up her Sphere One label in 1999, the year she quit her job as designer for Donna Karan in New York to return home to her native Dublin. With its clean lines, innovative construction and fashion-forward silhouettes, her cashmere collection has grown from strength to strength in the past seven years and her customers include some of the country's most high-profile women.
She now shows in Dublin, Paris, London and New York twice a year and has stockists across Europe, the UK, the US and Japan. Last month, her company was one of a number of small enterprises selected to represent Europe on a trade mission to Japan to promote and highlight European design.
In a separate development, she has also collaborated with Inis Meáin knitwear on the Aran Islands to augment their existing collection, the results of which were launched in Paris in March. The new pieces include a textured cashmere/merino coat and a bubble cardigan in a basket cable stitch.
"What I love about knit is that you can make a whole garment from one piece of yarn and you are shaping as you are making - that's very beautiful in its own way. The natural elasticity of jersey is always comfortable to wear and I love the feel, the drape and the stretchiness of knit." See www.sphereone.biz
SINÉAD CLARKE: KNITWEAR DESIGNER OF THE YEAR
Fresh out of Limerick School of Art and Design in November, Clarke is off to Milan, armed with her degree, to work with Missoni, the Italian knitwear company, for three months. It's part of her winning the prize of knitwear designer of the year in the Mittelmoda competition in Italy, where her collection of colourful knits, based on a circus theme, beat 1,500 competitors from all over the world.
Clarke, who is from Co Cavan, became interested in knitwear in her last year at college and loves the fact that everything, from start to finish, is her own work. "I've always been interested in print and I can incorporate print into fashion and create my own patterns and textures rather than having to buy fabrics," she says. Her winning collection played on the idea of clowns and tents, using a diamond motif. Each garment was panelled and a showpiece skirt (below) with external seams was a colourful swirl of red, blue and yellow cotton 10-metres wide. Winning the competition "was a great start" she says, and she's looking forward to Italy, while planning to develop a collection of wool handbags.
HEATHER FINN: RICH PATTERNS AND SUBTLE COLOURS
Heather Finn inherited a painterly eye for colour from her artist mother Leonie Finn, and it shows in the exuberant, vibrant patterns she creates in stitch. At her studio in North Strand in Dublin 1 on a chilly day, she is wearing a heavy cashmere cable sweater, a present from Lainey Keogh with whom she trained for a year after graduating in textiles from the National College of Art & Design. Her love of knit developed in college, when she discovered the satisfaction of creating her own patterns.
Back home in Galway, she worked in the jewellery business for a year, but moved back to Dublin and started knitting again, selling her pieces in Cow's Lane. Her big break came with orders from Top Shop, which "forced me to set up a proper business".
Her little cashmere and lurex shrugs and colourful, striped scarves were instant hits, but she became bored by the endless repetition of making the same things over and over again, and now wants to supply small, exclusive boutiques. Orders placed by buyers at Showcase earlier this year are providing encouragement.
Her pieces are mostly shrugs and kimono shapes inspired by a recent visit to Japan, but what's outstanding about her work are the rich patterns and subtle colour combinations.
"I love the sampling bit, the instinctive thing of experimentation, of trying things out, seeing where things work. I like to keep shapes simple so they don't compete with the patterns," she says. Her knitwear can be found in Miriam O'Reilly in Galway, Sandz in Ranelagh, Leitrim Design House in Carrick-on-Shannon and The Cat and the Moon in Sligo.
LOUISE KNATCHBULL: LUXURY KNITWEAR FOR KIDS
Knatchbull specialises in luxury children's knits that sell to upscale outlets such as Saks in New York, The Cross in London and The White Company. She is the daughter of well-known knitwear designer Joan Millar, so not surprisingly, she was drawn to the industry from an early age.
Knatchbull trained in Scotland and Italy. She is an expert on the complicated fibre technology of cashmere and was always interested in fashion. After a period designing Dressage knitwear for Paul Costelloe, she went on to become head of ladies' knitwear in Burberry, gaining further experience in design and marketing with the China Company.
Returning to Ireland after she wed, she now works with her mother developing design concepts, along with her own childrenswear collections."I just love the different yarns and the wool - I'd far rather buy knitwear than any other fabric," she says. Her children's clothes in cashmere and merino are "fun, modern classics", she says. But as a mother herself, she says they are designed for playwear "and are not too trendy". She recently took part in Dublin Fashion Week, and has just appointed a "fantastic" New York agent. She sees further expansion in the US on the cards. See: www.joanmillar.com
TIM RYAN: SKIRTS AS SCULPTURE
Tim Ryan from Nenagh in Tipperary (who showed in Dublin Fashion Week for the first time this year) grew up playing with wool on his mother's knitting machine, and is one of the few designers who can actually knit and crochet by hand as well as by machine. His colourful, circular skirts have a cult following in Ireland and he says that construction rather than knitting is what his collections are all about - "the fact that they are knitted is a secondary consideration."
His emphasis on form stems from a background studying fashion and later sculpture in Limerick School of Art and Design, after which he moved to Dublin and started to develop a private customer base. Some of his more popular pieces are lace lurex tops in hand-transferred machine lace, made on a standard Brother domestic machine. He knits and crochets all his own samples and now, based in London, is developing a fully fledged collection handmade by women in Macedonia with fair-trade accreditation. He describes his knitwear as "romantic, but with an austere edge - the sexiness is in the cut and fall rather than cleavage."
He is currently working on seamless one-piece garments. He uses very fine wools and ribbon wrapping, a double-sided fabric similar to a boucle, lined with cashmere. In Dublin, his knitwear can be found in Ave Maria in Clarendon Street and later in the year, will be showcased in Brown Thomas.
TARLACH DE BLACAM: INIS MEÁIN - A NEW TAKE ON THE CLASSICS
Anchored in a long tradition of handknitting and one of the most celebrated knitwear companies in the world, Inis Meáin is in a league of its own. It designs, makes and exports from a tiny island out in the Atlantic to some of the most upmarket stores and boutiques in Europe, the US and Asia.
From humble beginnings making sweaters for tourists, it has developed into a successful and significant Irish business, producing collections of men's and women's wear twice a year on state-of-the art Japanese computer machinery, using high-quality, imported Italian and South American yarns such as pure cashmere, cashmere blends and baby alpaca. The collections shown in Italy, Paris, New York and Tokyo reinterpret familiar classics in new shapes and luxury yarns, and are also about sophisticated, modern streetwear.
Owner Tarlach de Blacam is buoyant about the future: "Despite the substantial increase in price for US customers, it is no problem for big stores such as Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, and the Italian and German markets are really growing, despite our biggest competition being small Italian companies.
"The demand at present is for really tight fishermen's sweaters (in menswear), while women's shapes are big and floppy. Everybody is doing Aran knits and if you do them in the traditional way, they look old-fashioned. But if you pull a stitch from the Aran repertoire and do it in a new way, as we have done with a basket weave coat, it looks modern and people want it."