Sinéad O’Dwyer is Raising the Bar on What Inclusive Fashion Truly Entails

Do you know how hard it is to sit a pleated skirt on a wide hip without it fanning out? Have you wondered why shirts always gape between buttons when the wearer has a big bust? For Sinéad O’Dwyer, these intricacies in tailoring for different body shapes are more than just a consideration, but an ethos for her eponymous brand. Instead of releasing a separate plus size clothing line or positioning Sinéad O’Dwyer as a plus size brand, the Irish designer has made a point of proving what inclusivity in fashion could - and should - mean.

Speaking with Gina Tonic before her LFW show last Friday, the pair discussed drawing inspirations from family, romanticised teenage years and fighting to change industry standards.

Hi Sinead! I love your work, how has your morning been? How are preparations for the show going?

Good! We're a lot more organised this season - it’s our second season - so I understand what to expect more. I have big ambitions for how much sleep I'm gonna get and I really hope that I can achieve them.

How do you find being an Irish designer in London and do you incorporate your heritage into your work?

I always incorporate a personal narrative and the last season and this season is to do with where I grew up for sure. Last season I was thinking about memories of summer camps in Ireland, but this season is very linked to a specific memory from growing up. My granny passed away in the summer and she was a really amazing aran knitter. We're not doing aran knitting, we are doing a homage to her craft work. 

But yeah, I definitely incorporate pieces of my Irish heritage. It's kind of inevitable when your work is very personal.
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So your granny is hugely influential on the new collection? 

Definitely. She taught me to sew and knit and got me started in making things from really young.  We used to go to her house and she'd be like 'Oh, let's make something' or she'd be in the middle of making something so we'd want to make something with her. She'd be baking or sewing or anything. I think women of that generation as well, they just had to make so much from scratch. She always made all her own clothes and her mother did as well, like, so she made all our communion dresses and my mam's wedding dress. 

In the collection we’ve done a trench coat because she always wore a trench coat - which I never really thought about and then I was just thinking about how women of that generation would have seen films and have this association with the trench and glamour. My granny’s relationship with fashion and why she chose certain garments definitely influenced me.

I bet she loved that you were a fashion designer.

It's funny actually, when she was about 12 she started working in a cigarette factory but she had really wanted to be a nanny, because she saw these nannies in Bristol who always looked very glamorous in their black outfits, and then after that dream passed, she really wanted to be a dressmaker. But she didn't get to do those things in the end because her dad was like, no, the factory is a great job, and she stayed put. 

But then I ended up being a nanny for 12 years. And now I'm a designer! She was always like, ‘Oh, you're doing all my things!’ 

“Clothing is so powerful. It’s upsetting to be deemed so unimportant that no one bothered to make anything for you.”

What else inspires and influences your designs this season?

I think I mentioned it, but there’s one specific memory that I played into for the collection. That feeling of coming home from school in a uniform, or, like in your pyjamas and going outside to hang out with my neighbours, Like sneaking out the window at night and just throwing on stuff and being in the middle of the countryside in the fields in the rain. A romanticisation of those moments back home and being outside at night in the rain.

I’m also hugely driven by textile development. Taking traditional techniques and adapting and changing them. A lot of my work is very much based on ideas for textiles and how those textiles create part of the construction. Not flat textiles, but how they can weave around the body.

Then another thing I suppose had always been the form of the body. Who are we having model for the season? What new shapes do they have, that we're going to draw from in the patterns?

The celebration of the body is so obvious in your work. Your casting is some of the most diverse I’ve seen without feeling forced - why is body diversity so important to you?

I never really intended to have a brand, but I do now and it's great. I went to fashion school that was okay, certain aspects of that were very toxic as we all know, then I did an internship and went back to that place to work as a trainee and while I really loved working there - I loved the labour aspect, I loved the making, I loved the designers I worked with, the swatches, and all of that - I hated everything within the rest of it. 

In terms of sustainability and waste and the people that I saw coming in for the show to do fittings… It was just absolutely scandalous how incredibly thin everyone was. I just felt so uncomfortable with how empty that felt. I love the work, I love the making, I love the craft, and then the translation to the runway was just so empty and depressing and toxic. Not that I'm saying all of those models were like that, but the surrounding culture and the obsession with thinness didn't really meld with the parts of the industry I loved. 

So I left and I decided to do a masters, because I had met someone who had told me about Zowie Broach and RCA and her way of thinking about developing what your role in fashion would be. I just thought, okay I really need to go somewhere where I can figure this out because I love fashion but I also don't know how I fit in because I don't really love so many aspects of it. 

During the MA I realised I had an eating disorder and I had had one for many years and I really struggled with body dysmorphia. I never ever realised that actually somehow until I was in that atmosphere with tutors who are really like, what are you trying to do? What do you want to say? I started reflecting on past experiences within the industry and the things that I hated about it and I came to the conclusion that at the end of the day, it was all about many things but also my own relationship with clothing and how I was always trying to look a certain way that I didn't look.

I loved your Vogue article explaining you wanted others to feel “right” in their clothing and how a lot of issues with fitting big bodies stem from tailoring, but there is no differentiation between straight and plus sizes in your work - is it especially difficult to make clothing that fits all bodies correctly?

I have to make a lot of choices about who I'm actually targeting the tailoring at, and so even in the smaller sizes, I'm targeting people with a fuller chest and bigger thighs and bodies like that. Our focus is curve, regardless of the size, because I think there's plenty of size six people with a fuller chest and stomach and a bum too who can’t even fit in sample sizes. 

That's the focus of the brand, because there's plenty of brands that do the other stuff. 

I think something that I struggle with is there's a size point where some people have a flatter chest but a wider bandwidth and some people have a bigger chest and then smaller bandwidth and that's around size fourteen. We think eventually we will have two fits of certain items, like two shirts would both be size fourteen but they would have a bigger back with a flatter section for the front or vice versa. Details like that are so important.

Hopefully we'll be able to do that as the brand grows and we have more of our own money to put into it, because I think what I'd love to have is certain basics, like a suit jacket, trousers, shirt, whatever, that were offered from size six to size thirty and then with two fits per person. It is very ambitious, but I think that would be the ultimate goal. 

It’s a lot of hard work! Finally then, how do you feel as a slimmer woman getting this acclaim for body inclusivity?

I've actually not had anyone ask me that before but I've thought about it a lot. At the end of the day, the reason I started this brand was for a very personal reason, which is very important to me. At the end of the day even ‘slimmer’ has never been necessarily ‘good enough’ within luxury fashion, because models aren’t slim per se - in the 2000s models weren't slim, models were absolutely tiny. I think every single person who grew up within that time period, regardless of their size, has felt completely inadequate in some way. T

The culture of the fashion industry has been built to do with the body and controlling it. I've rarely met anyone who has not been touched by the culture that fashion and beauty has created around the body regardless of the size. 

I'm doing this work as well for myself, because I wear size twelve to fourteen and my body changes all the time. So few people, especially past their 20s, can fit lots of designer stuff, there's a huge range of people who can't buy luxury as it is.

Clothing is so powerful. It’s upsetting to be deemed so unimportant that no one bothered to make anything for you. That's such a horrible thing to feel, that essentially the money and infrastructure being put behind creating garments isn’t there for you. It’s a lack of respect and it’s discrimination, it isn’t fair and I couldn’t let it carry on.

Words: Gina Tonic