Dublin Independent Fashion Week (DIFW) opens on Monday promising “to blur the lines between fashion, art and performance”. Now in its third year, it will feature more than 30 immersive events and a series of fashion shows including a debut “Chapter 7 Sex before Marriage” unisex bridal line from Rion Hannora, knitwear designer Mihai Mar’s life-drawing fashion presentation “Merits Over Mischief”, Pellador’s AW25 debut, and Conor O’Brien’s “Phantom Thread” collection. The closing celebration fashion show at IMMA on Sunday week will bring the event to an end.
What started in 2022 as a way of showcasing hardworking young designers in Dublin – Rion Hannora, Laoise Carey, Megan McGuigan and Aisling Duffy, later joined by Mihai Mar and others – has now grown to a group of 60 emerging and established fashion and beauty brands. It is collaborative, co-operative, completely self-funded and inclusive.
“We wanted to give designers more creative control than ever before, giving them space to realise fully their vision,” says DIFW project manager Mihai Mar. In August some of those designers – including Jennifer Slattery, Mihai Mar, Aoife Rooney of Aoife Lifestyle and Sarah O’Neill of ZeroWaster – presented their collections at Copenhagen Fashion Week, all meeting the sustainability requirements of the Danish capital.
Other features of DIFW week include sustainable fashion showcases, workshops on repair and circular design, pop-ups and charity auctions. An introductory panel discussion in Bewleys of Grafton Street on Monday evening, “From Aran to the Atelier”, will explore fashion in Ireland’s past, present and future, moderated by journalist and editor Victoria Brunton with guest speakers including Ciara Byrne, formerly of Condé Nast and now on the board of the British Fashion Council, and designer and lecturer Natalie B Coleman of NCAD, introduced by Aisling Farinella.
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“We work so hard during the year, and sending out images from photoshoots felt empty – ending up in a black hole in the internet,” says Hannora. “We wanted a real experience for people to see the clothes which we have been working on for the past year, and a chance to celebrate our own and each other’s work.”
From Cork and a graduate of LSAD, Hannora’s interests were originally theatre, ballet and the dramatic arts, “but I was really bad at dancing and a bad actor so it took time to realise that I could be on a stage in a different way. Now I make clothes for actors and musicians”.
She also inherited craft skills from three generations of talented women – her mother, grandmother and great grandmother were all “amazing seamstresses”. Growing up, she was always foraging for bargain boxes of fabrics to cut up and stitch. “At college I realised there was much more to the technical side.” In San Francisco she worked for a denim fashion house where squares from discarded denim were cut out and remade into patchwork jackets.
Back in Ireland she started making for friends and developed corsets, now very much her signature, which she sprayed with Cork graffiti, earning an award from Cork City Council “which gave me a bit of a boost to keep going”.
In Dublin she started her own studio in Om Diva, where she has been working for the past two years. One of her many fans is singer Kate Nash, with whom she has collaborated – she dressed her for her gig at Dublin’s Academy last December.
Her show will feature 13 models and three musicians dressed by her, with “ethereal, spooky and traditional music” created by members of the trad supergroup Biird for the Reverb show now on tour around Ireland. Be prepared for it to shake up conventional notions of wedding attire, but have its own drama and identity, in keeping with the spirit of DIFW.
For information and tickets, see @dublin_ifw on Instagram.
