Irish Fashion in Unusual Spaces

By Jeanne Sutton
22nd Oct 2014

Concrete Collar is one of our favourite spaces on the Irish internet – and they’re Image.ie Blog Award nominees to boot. The blog, run by Ciana March and Becky Wallace, is a highly regarded curated hub of fashion and architecture – a combination that blends seamlessly as their latest post proves, again.

This week saw the two graduate architects collaborate with Open House Dublin, the annual ?festival? run by the Irish Architecture Foundation that opens up interesting Dublin buildings to memebers of the public for a weekend of tours, and snooping. Concrete Collar decided to bring their fusion to the brains of the IAF in order to ?celebrate the wealth of homegrown designer talent Ireland has to offer in a series of distinguished spaces.? It works – a lone model wanders three locations -?the Dublin Port Centre,?The Lake House and the?Merrion Cricket Pavilion.

Why asked Ciana why these particularly sparse locations? “We were looking for diversity with regards location, materiality, form and function. AOF’s Lake House is a residential building like no other – it’s front garden is a lake and it’s back garden is the sea. Scott Tallon Walker’s Dublin Port Centre, situated in Dublin’s docklands, is perhaps one of the most overlooked buildings on the Open House programme. However, it is an excellent example of elegance in concrete frame construction and design and we wanted to show it in a new light. TAKA’s cricket club is located in a suburban South Dublin area. We were keen to feature it’s beautiful brick work. Each space is also true to our own aesthetic. It’s always important to us that the architectural context does not overpower the designer’s collections, and vice versa.??

The designers chosen are a roll call the best this country is currently offering -?Peter O’Brien, Zoe Jordan, Danielle Romeril, Simone Rocha and?Caoimhe MacNeice.