We speak to Irish designer Conor O’Brien, who talks about his Aran knitwear, which he hand-knits himself, his favourite go-to independent shops, and Dublin Fashion Week
Emerging Irish fashion designer Conor O’Brien is known for his bespoke garments, Aran knitwear, and muted colour schemes.
Growing up in Dublin, at just 25, Conor is fresh off the release of his collection from late last year, Phantom Thread, where he hand-knits and designs his own pieces inspired by the Victorian era, while adding in some contemporary elements
Speaking about his specfic look to RSVP Live, Conor says: “So I have had a lot of identities and ideas going on before but something that has grounded me to create an image is always just going with my gut and ignoring looking left and looking right all the time and whatever can happen organically from the what the kind of products that you create or the pieces that you create will happen naturally for you.
“What I love about knitting and knitwear and the use of the natural fibres is that you’re kind of grounded in that, and there’s no getting out of that in a sense. And I know a lot of designers wouldn’t like the limitations imposed by using only natural colours or only natural materials. I actually like that restrictive framework, because it challenges me more as a designer.”
Conor launched his collection Phantom Thread last September: “I kind of wanted to do something a little bit more avant-garde and provide a bit more of a contemporary design context to Irish fashion, which I still think lacks a lot across the board.
“I wanted to show, you know, a Dublin audience or an Irish audience a different way of approaching clothing that doesn’t prioritise whether it flatters you or not, doesn’t prioritise finished, beautiful hems,
“It is a more anthropological approach to it. So, I’ve often thought, is there some brand identity thing going on where there’s one very clean route of a beautiful knitwear brand and everything that that entails and then another route of being purely avant-garde, but right now, just actually going with both of them and not allowing them to fight with each other, I feel now I’m settling into a brand identity that is a mix of both and shows that I can do, it just happens organically, I think.”
When shopping for inspiration or for his own wardrobe, Conor has a few favourites in mind, whether he’s at home in Dublin or abroad.
“I love going around shops, but my biggest thing is avoiding chain stores. I do love to go into and look at places like Sculpt, Beautiful South, which is run by my cousin Grainne Wynne, I would say, like I learned taste from her to be honest, you know, taste as in not good or bad taste but just cultivating taste and how to do that.
“There are plenty of stores in Antwerp, Belgium, that inspire me. There are stores over in Antwerp, one called Labels.
“My biggest thing is going to places that are independent, that are putting the trust in the store owner to be the taste maker and cultivate collections themselves because if because it’s more dependent on, you know, when you have someone running a store themselves and putting a collection together, you know that how they consider the design that they include in their store is going to be much bigger of a deal than, you know Macy’s or Blooming Dales in New York.
“With my shopping, my own shopping, whether it’s vintage shopping, which I do a lot of as well, vintage shopping, charity shopping, I kind of try to gather a little archive for myself, which is a point of reference as well. So, I have certain pieces that I don’t really wear at all necessarily, but I’ll always cherish, and I’ll never sell because of the fabric they’re made of or the way they cut something or it might not even be individual details, but it might be the whole entire bit of a garment and what that represents and what that means.
I consider shopping for clothing to be building a personal archive, which, I feel, helps me make better shopping decisions. You know I can move between maybe more regular shopping through vintage clothing, and you know, because it’s cheaper, which is great.
Then once in a while, you know, now and again throughout the year, maybe once a year, I’ll invest in a certain special piece from a new designer. I think it’s also led me to be more sustainable in my wardrobe, in retrospect.
Conor’s Victorian-inspired pieces have distinct silhouettes and structure, which he likes to combine with contemporary Irish fashion.
“To be honest, that actually comes from over the course of many, many years, but since college specifically, I had always been looking at Victorian fashion, something that inspires me the most. I love leg-of-mutton sleeves and gigot sleeves. That was really popular, particularly towards the end of the century.
“I remember through various college projects that would always be a frame of reference for me. And from there, I figured out how I could approach this in knitting and knitwear specifically. And that proved a huge challenge in construction because knitwear is so flat. Trying to create something so incredibly 3D was a real challenge. But it was a design process in and of itself.
“I developed a pattern that is all sorts of engineering to produce that dramatic sleeve and everything like that. It’s funny to see how something that obviously is so steeped in the past, like in Victorian fashion, like a leg of button sleeve, how if you apply it to a certain shape and put it forward in a certain look, then it can be incredibly contemporary.
“I don’t love it when everything is constantly restricted to conventional ideas of pattern-causing and pattern-making. There’s a huge tradition in the sewing world and the knitting world of this idea of the right way of doing things, and then if you go against that, you are kind of invalidated, you know, if you cut something a certain way or if you finish a certain seam a certain way. So, my way of railing against that is just doing things as I kind of see fit.
“That produces a different silhouette altogether. I’m not worried about traditional notions of bodice draping or anything like that. I’d rather approach dressing the body in a different way altogether.”
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