Finding alternative methods for presenting, redesigning and breaking through the narrowness of fashion design drives Sinead O’Dwyer. Her spring 2024 lookbook, called Assembly, is a joyful affirmation of her embrace of body positivity, including UK sizes 6-30. This season she published it off the catwalk, in combination with a conversation she had with Mohoro Seward at the Royal College of Art in London – at the fashion studio Masters, where her dissent from the strictures of conventional pattern cutting first took shape as a student.
O’Dwyer belongs to the radical sisterhood that includes Ester Manas, Karoline Vitto, Di Petsa and Chopova Lowena. Everyone puts their own stamp on a style proposal. This season, O’Dwyer took the space and time to explain the psychological and technical backstory behind her signatures: the subversively sexual hybrid of school uniform, ingenious tailoring and latticework body parts that walked while she talked.
“This is part of my personal journey,” she said. “It’s kind of a place where I discovered the root of a lot of, I think, mental health stuff that I was going through related to body dysmorphia and eating disorders — and (I) started connecting the dots in class , with clothing experiences I had had.” The particular revelation O’Dwyer cited is the fact that garment design starts with standardized pacifiers, and from there scales up to larger sizes, where the fit starts to go haywire. Fashion students should only practice dress shapes for school (as alternatives are expensive to purchase), she said. The industrialized result: the suffering and despair experienced by women and girls confronted in changing rooms with clothes that don’t fit – and the conclusion that it is our bodies that are to blame. “That’s something I never understood growing up.”
Who does? O’Dwyer charted her own course, developing lifelike molds for friends and working out technical features to support busts (with halter necks, for example) and retain curves in openwork bodysuits and leotards. Her results are festive and rich in the youthful eroticism that O’Dwyer brings to fashion.
“It’s clear that representation is such an important part of changing the industry,” she noted to Seward. The point she made is the level of expertise and new thinking that needs to be applied to achieve that. “Because the multi-agency research and development phase is what really creates sustainable change.
