Michéal McInerney

My name is Michéal Mc Inerney, I’m a 22 year old fashion designer from west Clare in Ireland. My work tends to centre my relationship with the land, culture, and flora of my home place. The area I’m from in Clare, Ballyherragh, is located mere metres away from the Cliffs of Moher, it’s an extremely beautiful place, gothic, austere and brutal by nature. It’s also a place dominated by cultural conservatism, very catholic and very rural. It’s this tension of my experience of the place that tends to lead my creative process, the feeling of otherness from your home, paired with brutal beauty. With my graduate collection “Hag’s Head” I used this feeling along with imagery and illustration as a mood for the collection, contextualising it with the local legend about the area and pairing that with my love for unconventional cutting and construction. My passion is evening wear, and I take a lot of influence from evening wear designers such as Madame Grès and Cristóbal Balenciaga. Part of that influence manifests in my collection with heavy pleating, unconventional tailoring/seaming and internal and separate corsetry to hold shape. My plan for the future is to become a pattern cutter, as it’s often resolving ideas and toiling that I find most enjoyable about the design process, and after gaining experience through pattern cutting I’d eventually like to open my own evening wear brand.