Not many Irish designers can claim that their careers started teaching art in a forest in the Dublin mountains. But that’s how Aoife Rooney, a designer who has won awards for sustainability and circularity in fashion, first began her working life.
“My forte was fine art and portrait drawing and I spent 11 years at the Pine Forest Arts Centre in Glencullen teaching jewellery making and screen printing — it was a great life outdoors,” she recalls when we meet at Beautiful South in Rathmines, one of the stockists of her latest collection of clothing and accessories.
That experience led to her founding an events business with a workforce of 10 people. But when serious illness struck her eldest child, she took time off to care for her, for more than eight years. During this time Rooney achieved a master’s in education and later specialised in eco-printing. She also completed a course in fashion and dressmaking at the Grafton Academy.
“I had been thinking of starting my own brand with a deep grá for biodiversity because eco printing is such a slow process,” she says. “I was testing banana and coco fabrics and came across econyl made from ghost fishing nets — discarded nets that represent 49 per cent of ocean waste. This discovery made me realise that I wanted to work with regenerating the environment and producing an ethical product,” she says.
In 2017 she launched Aoife, a line of luxury accessories, featuring nine different bags. “Within three months it got huge publicity in the UK by people mindful of circular design,” she says. “We were chosen by the Crown Estate to do a conscious pop-up and in Italy selected as designers making a positive impact, putting us on the same grid as Prada. And at the Moda Museum in Atlanta’s Full Circle Design exhibition highlighting circularity, I was the only Irish designer.”
Expanding from accessories to clothing, making use of deadstock materials from factories and “breathing life into something old” was a natural organic development. Her latest collection, called Marcella after a stylish grandmother, makes use of Irish and Italian tweed, beetled Irish linen from William Clarke, French corduroy and GOTs-certified [global organic textile standard] cotton, all factory leftovers. She is also using Galway Wool for hand-knitted gilets to pre-order. “I use anything I can get my hands on.”
These materials are refashioned into everything from tailored skirts and wet-look dresses to her signature sculptural pleated shirts and ruffled-shouldered bomber jackets. Easy-going loose-fitting tops and trousers are designed with menopausal women in mind, cool in every sense. This season she has introduced a line of knee-length starprint socks in brown, beige and white, which would make lovely Christmas gifts.
Her plans now include furthering her business in the United Kingdom and Europe and exhibiting at Scoop in London, Tranoi in Paris, Coterie in New York and CIFF in Copenhagen. Rooney is stocked in Dromoland Castle, Co Clare, McKimmie in New York, Some Fancy Name in Denmark, Wolf & Badger in the UK, Beautiful South, Rathmines in Dublin, Marion Cuddy in Powerscourt and Les Jumelles, Galway, as well as online at aoifelifestyle.com
- Instagram: @aoifelifestyle (not to be confused with a similar-sounding Irish brand). Photographer Martin O’Neill, styling Aoife & Danny Thomas, models @rosmodelmanagement. Location: Killashee Hotel, Naas.
