Feline fashionable

DEIRDRE MCQUILLANmeets artist, illustrator and fashion designer, the mysterious, elusive and inimitable Kitty Moss, creator of Maud Minet

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to classify Lyn Allen and her many talents because she exists in her own self created world. A gifted illustrator, under her nom de plume, Kitty Moss she creates colourful characters from her vivid and often mischievous imagination, dresses them in print, then makes real clothes. Not many people come armed with first-class honours degrees in both fine art and fashion from NCAD, and her first exhibition this month at the Little Green Street Gallery in Dublin encompassed art installation, a fashion collection and illustrations. “I am trying to carve out my own little niche,” she says, when we meet in a Capel Street café. “I don’t think there’s anybody making clothes based on a character – it’s a whimsical approach.”

Her characters, Maud and Minet – also the name of her website and label – are a well-dressed but darkly spectral muse and her feline follower, Minet. “My life is filled with characters that I make up. There’s a bit of poking fun, it’s playful, but I also love things that are dark and gloomy. My mother always called me Maud. Minet means little kitten and as I love cats and Kate Moss, Kitty Moss stuck as a name,” she says.

Maud and Minet are a darkly comic pair and their social diary is full of catty send-ups of fashion cliches that caption the illustrations. “Embrace the lace or burn at the stake” or “even floating backwards, she was fashion forward” and so on. It comes as no surprise that Moss has a healthy disregard for celebrity fashion, and shudders even at the name of Heat magazine. Growing up in Dublin, she was always drawing pictures and painted everything. “Every egg in the house had to have a smiley face. I made a mess everywhere, put googly eyes on lampshades, Barbie wedding cakes on My Little Pony.” Having studied fine art, which was “a touch dark and existential”, she worked in Five Scarlet Row, then her mother suggested a fashion degree.

“‘No way’, I replied. I had never sewn anything in my life.”

However, she threw herself into it, working from 8am to 10pm every night for three years and graduated with a degree collection based on Irish mythical female figures in 2009. Shortly afterwards, she went to work with John Rocha doing illustrations for T-shirts “and making cards for every birthday”, but left after a year.

“I loved it there, but there comes a time when you have to move on.” She had also started work on a children’s book about a fat cat and a dog called Beavis and Blossom, which has been temporarily parked. To support her art, she manages the Dark Horse bar on George’s Quay, which has been in her family for years.

The work is “gruelling” but already she is making her mark there, too, painting the walls and creating intriguing murals.

Her dresses are elaborate affairs made with luxurious vintage fabrics such as lace, silk and leather. The collection includes a long skirt with a draped front in handbeaded tulle from India, while another was made from an elaborately hand-embroidered and embellished panel which she painstakingly removed from a vintage wool dress. On the day of the opening, she was wearing a black leather jacket inset with panels of black lace which she had made herself. Another piece was composed of tiny silk petals. “[It was] a total pain in the ass to do,” she says. “But I am really inspired by fabrics.” Moss cites the work of Sharon Wauchob and Helen Cody as influences. Her own style is completely her own, and most of what she wears comes from secondhand shops – such as the colourful, hand-beaded bolero she is wearing the day we meet, bought for €5 in a charity shop in Galway, worn with a black crepe toile from her second year at college. Her TK Maxx shoes are “adorned” with googly eyes.

Encouraged by the reaction to her exhibition, she plans to mount a bigger one to include a stage performance. “I can only do what I can do and if it doesn’t get me anywhere, at least I will know. ‘You are the strangest person,’ a friend said to me recently. ‘You can never make a decision, but when it comes to your taste, it is always, this is my way.’” And with a shake of her blonde hair and an enigmatic smile, she adds: “I am not sure about where I want to go, but I am sure about where I don’t want to go . . .”

Kitty Moss is one of 36 contemporary visual artists featured in Art Style, an exhibition in Brown Thomas that opened this week and runs for three weeks in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. maudandminet.com; kittymoss.com