A chair props open the hall door of a huge Georgian house on the banks of the Grand Canal in Dublin. Dressmakers' dummies stand to attention inside. Huge wooden tables strewn with gouache and water-colour drawings, cardboard patterns, set squares, swatches of fabric, and copies of Vogue fill the rooms inside where, perched on stools, crouched at sewing machines or draping dummies, are the workers.
It looks for all the world like a couturier's atelier in a calm moment between collections. But these aren't professional designers. They are, for the most part, teenagers who've chosen to spend their summer holidays doing an introductory course in fashion design at the Grafton Academy of Dress Designing. Eat your heat out, Armani.
So much for the sitcom image of teenagers languidly stretched on couch, feet firmly on coffee table. These teenagers have their feet very firmly planted on the ground and are taking their first steps along a career path.
"Even at the most basic level, we insist on professional standards," says Suzanne Marr, director of the Academy. "The message is, this is for real." Although some of the students are as young as 15, they all see the course as the first step towards a career in design. "I love art, art is my line," says 17-year-old Elizabeth Elliott who plans to do another course next summer and would love to do the Diploma in Dress Design when she leaves school. In the meantime she'll trade in her mum's old sewing machine for a better model and practise at home.
In another corner of the room Clare O'Connor is performing the final adjustments to an evening dress made out of photographic negatives. She's going into sixth year in September and will include the dress in her portfolio when she applies to the National College of Art next year.
The summer course at the Grafton Academy covers everything from drawing and pattern cutting, to making up the clothes. It also touches on fashion forecasting with the students taught to look at their designs in the context of what's happening in the fashion world at large. There's individual tuition so that each one can work at her own pace, while the teachers wander among them.
The students are encouraged to develop their own ideas and then learn to express them in their drawings. It all seems wildly glamorous until you get to the difficult part, transferring the design to a pattern. "Sometimes they do come up with ideas which are too ambitious," says Suzanne Marr. "Fashion is technical and you have to work within those constraints." Christine Gorby (17) says she's not a bit put off by the technical aspects of the whole thing.
"It's great to come up with an idea of what you want to make and see it through to the finish." There's a boy attending the summer course this year and over the years they've had boys as young as 16 on board. Eight men are following the diploma course at the moment.
"There are of course less men than women in our classes but I find that those who do come are usually very committed and make very good designers," adds Suzanne Marr. "They're more objective."
