The new wave of student fashion

It’s student fashion show season. Several Irish designers have built successful careers from these third-level competitions and fashion shows. So how do this year’s crop shape up?

FOR SOME, they’re just another date on the student calendar, a pet project with models on a makeshift catwalk in high-street clothes, and some element of a student-design competition tacked on. For others, they’re professionally run events that can be a gateway to prestigious internship opportunities. It’s the season of the student fashion show. Get ready to pin, pose and peer.

Tonight, DCU holds its show at the Helix, UCD held a big affair in February and Trinity recently resurrected its own show. Across the country, but primarily at NCAD, Limerick School of Art and Design and the Grafton Academy, students enter their designs, with prize money and exposure on the line.

Last week, the Vodafone DIT Fashion Show (which, along with the Persil Irish Fashion Awards is part of the curriculum in NCAD’s fashion department) took place at Vicar Street, with Aisling Connell of NCAD winning the Vodafone Student Design Award. The theme “End of the World – Dawn of a New Era” fed into Connell’s design, which incorporated chains and fishing line.

“I wanted to think about fragmentation,” Connell says, on the morning after her victory, “things might be shattered and pieced back together, so in the body suit, it’s sort of like a mosaic with loads of small pieces of fabric sewn together. Then outside, with the end of the world theme, I was thinking of armour, which is why I brought the chain into it. There’s the idea of falling and being pieced back together, something destroyed, so I used the fishing line to make it appear as if it was floating.”

Connell is well aware of the exposure such a victory can offer, and then there’s the €2,000 prize money, which will go towards her graduate show. A fashion student’s degree collection can cost a few thousand euro in materials alone.

“The money is obviously going to be a huge asset,” she says. In addition to the cash, there’s the opportunity for her designs to be featured in an upcoming Vodafone ad campaign. Upon graduation, she’s hoping to head to an internship in Paris or possibly Antwerp, although there’s also the draw of New York.

Victory, or being commended in a student-design event, opens doors in a competitive industry where few make it to the top. Last year, Umit Kutluk, who was studying at the Grafton Academy, swept the boards, winning the UCD, DIT, DCU and Gillette Venus Fashion Awards.

“It was a really motivating experience to participate in these competitions,” according to Kutluk. His autumn/winter women’s line was stocked in the Design Centre in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre in Dublin in 2011, followed by his 2012 spring/summer collection. He’s currently preparing pieces for Kerry and Galway Fashion Weeks and An Solas Nua in Washington DC, which promotes new Irish design in the US. He’s also well ahead in preparing his autumn/winter 2012 collection.

“It’s definitely a platform from which to progress,” he says of the student-fashion shows and awards, “The competitions are very prestigious, and as well as media exposure and recognition, it’s good to be able to officially say your design work is award-winning.”

Emmy Slattery (24) won the Nokia Young Designer of the Year award and the DIT Alpha Romeo Young Designer of the Year award on the same night in 2010. “It was mental, but I didn’t expect to win either of them. The Nokia one was first, it was announced I won that and I had to jump in a taxi to Vicar Street. Very flukey,” she remembers.

Slattery has gone on to design one-off pieces for musicians La Roux, The Klaxons and tour outfits for Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes. “Working with her was deadly,” Slattery says, “She’s really passionate about what she wanted to wear. I didn’t sleep for two or three days, but when you log on to the internet and see someone like her wearing something you’ve made on stage in the Sydney Opera House – I get my kicks out of that.”

In her third year at NCAD Slattery interned with Christopher Kane. Upon graduating from college, she interned with Gareth Pugh in London, one of her favourite designers.

“I worked for six months on the autumn winter 2011/2012 collection that showed in Paris last February. To have the opportunity to go and work with him, and be at a sewing machine with him sitting opposite me was amazing and surreal.”

Slattery, who also designs pieces for Irish pop act Bitches With Wolves, is currently back in Dublin, saving for a masters course she’s hoping to apply for at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and is also considering the prospect of working in the US.

THERE IS A long list of Irish students who participated in young-designer competitions and shows and swiftly advanced to greater things. Simone Rocha, who earned a BA in Fashion at NCAD and a Fashion MA from Central Saint Martins, was the runner-up in 2008’s Nokia Young Fashion Designer award. Since then, Topshop has selected one of her MA graduate designs to be stocked in its Oxford Circus store, she has designed a six-piece capsule collection for the chain, and Selfridges in London and Colette in Paris have prominently displayed her collections.

Una Burke from Roscommon completed her BA in Fashion Design at Limerick School of Art and Design in 2003 and was the winner of a student award from the Crafts Council of Ireland in 2009 while completing an MA in leatherwork at the London College of Fashion. In 2011, she won designer of the year at the Irish Fashion Innovation Awards. Her intricate, structured leather pieces ship internationally, and have been worn by Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Christina Aguilera.

With such high-profile breakthroughs, large cash prizes (the Persil Irish Fashion Award is worth €10,000), media exposure and tough competition, you’d expect stress levels and competitiveness to be high. Not so, says Linda Byrne, a lecturer in fashion at NCAD.

“The atmosphere is always really good and everyone is rooting for each other,” she says of the students, “They’re all delighted when one of the bunch wins, genuinely.”

Byrne says the shows and awards are extremely beneficial to students, and some are part of the curriculum in NCAD. The prize money is also helpful for funding internships, says Byrne: “It’s fantastic, particularly in this day and age because it’s so hard to come by paid jobs.”

The DCU Fashion Show 2012 takes place in the O’Mahony Hall, at the Helix, Dublin tonight. At the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin tonight Senior College Dún Laoghaire present A Feast For Your Eyes, two theatrical make-up catwalk shows showcasing the creative work of their theatrical media make-up students from throughout the year