‘Fashion is about one type of body and that’s toxic’: Irish designer Sinéad O’Dwyer’s mission to reshape clothes

Size matters when it comes to clothing. One Irish designer who believes fashion should be for all and is championing body diversity is London-based Sinéad O’Dwyer, who is presenting her second collection at London Fashion Week this weekend with New Gen support from the British Fashion Council.

A recipient of many awards and recognition for her groundbreaking approach to fashion that challenges conventional sizing, her practice, using life casting and moulding, takes into account different body shapes and sizes and those usually excluded from traditional sizing. High-profile names who have worn her clothes include singer-songwriters Beth Ditto, Björk, and US models Precious Lee and Paloma Elsesser.

While so-called “plus-sized” models are becoming more noticeable on catwalks and ecommerce sites, seeing different sized bodies in fashion is still not the norm, even though the average size is now 16. Very few brands work with models who have different body sizes other than the standard sample size 8, which is then scaled up, which doesn’t necessarily work in terms of proportion.

“What I am offering is more fits and new ways of sizing and putting different considerations into different sizes,” says O’Dwyer. Her sample size is 18-22.

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Based in a studio in Hoxton in east London, working with the support of the UK government’s Kickstart employment programme and an assistant, Dwyer makes everything by hand and creates new shapes using silicone casting of body shapes, a procedure that straddles sculpture and fashion to upend traditional ways of pattern making.

“It is really exciting to take sculpture and use the cast piece as a beginning point for the pattern cutting,” she says. Her Golden Fleece Award has enabled her to acquire an industrial sewing machine, a degassing chamber and vacuum pump for the complex techniques involved in making the cast pieces.

Her approach is informed by personal experience. While doing her MA in fashion at the Royal College of Art, “I realised a lot about my relationship with my body. I had always struggled to control eating and a very negative perception of myself since I was young. It’s quite common, and not a nice time to be a woman in that respect. Doing the MA, I was not sure about the industry and what I wanted to contribute, and that was when I discovered that fashion is about one type of body and how toxic that is, and how clothing makes you feel good or bad,” she says.

Since then, working with friends and photographer Steph Wilson and making a film, Wear Me Like Water, she has grown more confident and sure of her approach. Her debut collection with shirting made in a particular way, cleverly composed for different shapes, is already becoming a signature, as is her knitwear and colourful intricate lacing. “Everyone responded so well [to the collection] and we got new buyers,” she says. The show, with street cast models helping to tell the story of the collection, also became a talking point.

Her own background has played a significant role in her development. Her father is Kevin O’Dwyer, the noted artist and silversmith, known for his artful and playful metalwork. “I am maker because of him,” she says. Growing up in Tullamore, she remembers her grandmother as an “amazing Aran knitter; we all always made, so naturally ideas appeared through making rather than conceptually or writing, so having makers in my life and how to use materials definitely had an impact”.

Her academic fashion training was different from most – she studied in ArtEz University of the Arts in Arnhem in the Netherlands and remembers that “there were only 20 of us in the class. They had good facilities and attention to the technical side and different cultures. It is taught in English now but then it was in Dutch and I was one of two non-Dutch people there. It was a very interesting experience to go somewhere else, and coming from Tullamore the city seemed huge to me. But it gave me a different perspective.”

Her graduate collection called Dare To Eat A Peach in 2014 showed her exploration of shape and fabric, draping and moulding – a foretaste of what was to come. Later, wearable silicone sculptures and signature colourful body pieces were the focus of her exhibition in New York in 2020 called In Myself.

Up to recently, she managed to support herself financially through nannying with the same family for years, but now with various funding opportunities, she hopes to develop an ecommerce site and a made-to-measure service. Her way of making – working on numerous block patterns at once and a range of fit models instead of one – is demanding, but she believes firmly that designers should resolve the issue of body diversity by making fewer styles or showing in fewer seasons and focusing on the numbers of sizes per style or per season.

In her opinion, creating and caring for one size only can have a damaging impact on mental health for those who don’t see themselves represented. “Fashion is such a weird industry and changing all the time but a lot more designers are now ahead of things. I am just very much focused on what I am trying to do and catering for a group of people who have not been able to buy luxury before.”