Sasha Donnellan, the Irish Designer Reweaving Her Nation’s History into Stylish Literation
Ireland’s history is knotty, entangled in bouts of English colonisation and Christianisation begetting the attempted erasure of its folk traditions and customs begetting the imposition of new patriarchal power structures and dogmas to downtrod its women. “I think being a woman is like being Irish,” the great philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch once said, “[because] you take second place all the time.” Confronting these Gordian ties of capital-h History, sedimented over centuries of settler projects and imperial violence from across the Irish Sea, Dublin-born fashion designer Sasha Donnellan takes a deft hand, untangling then reweaving these notes in boldly liberatory fashion.
A graduate of Paris’s prestigious Ecole Supérieur des Arts et Techniques de la Mode (ESMOD) – whose alumni include the haute couturier Franck Sorbier and Simon Porte Jacquemus – Donnellan’s graduate collection, entitled “It Was Mine First”, was the sentimental culmination of these pious efforts. With a fine-tuned engagement with fashion as a medium for social critique, Donnellan welded together Ireland’s and women’s histories as metaphors for one another, the perpetual resilience of both the enduring bind. For “It Was Mine First”, she fused motifs that spoke to and rethought these connections in simple yet profound aesthetic gestures: bridal elements as metaphors for femininity, rustic ones as reclamations of Irish folk craft, military accoutrements as analogies for the guerilla war that have time after time been launched against both patriarchal and colonial oppression, hand-in-hand.
The resultant garments are both ephemeral and fantastic, sartorial topographies of voluminous white and ancestral art. Through this, Donnellan has created a distinct visual lexicon: dreamy, wraithlike silhouettes that recall indigenous folklore and fantasy, Irish Aran wool and reinventions of the Galway shawl to tangibly connect these garments to traditional and historical craft. And it’s a visual lexicon she dialogues with the Irish landscape, preferring to shoot her garments in its mystical wild. So, her woollen whites melt, kelpie-like, into the churlish black sea; or models stood stand amidst mountains and fens, their poses its witch-like revolt. If English colonisation sought to efface Irish history and folklore, persecute the country’s traditional wise women and healers through centuries of epistemological poison, Donnellan unearths these metaphysical whispers and reconnects with her past in a way that is more than just performance. Her clothing and their stories bridge the gap between the material and the metaphysical, between the then and the now.
And also from the now to the next. In her upcoming collection “Lupus and Agnus”, named for the Aesopian fable, Donnellan seeks to sew the darker sister to “It Was Mine First”, thinking through the fairytale as an allegory for violence, tyranny, and the oppressive dishonesty of those in power. Yet, Donnellan doesn’t want to pigeon-hole meaning, insist on narratives. Laying a baseline that the collection is a metaphor for the injustices committed against women in the name of religion and politics, she wants to nonetheless leave its possible readings open to new interpretations. “We live in turbulent times,” she reminds us, “the dynamic of the powerful preying upon the powerless is not confined to any one place.”
Words by Jude Jones