Róisín Pierce talks new collections, inspiration and plans for 2025
Still riding high from debuting her latest collection 'Nothing Pure Can Stay' at Paris Fashion Week earlier this morning, Irish designer Róisín Pierce sits down with Paul McLauchlan to touch on new season inspiration, exciting collaborations and the brand’s expansion into everyday and evening wear.
Róisín Pierce underscored the importance and value of craftsmanship at a time when algorithms and endless scrolling rule contemporary life, returning to the gilded parlours of the Irish Embassy in Paris for her annual collection at Paris Fashion Week. Entitled ‘Nothing Pure Can Stay,’ the Irish designer was thinking about the tremulous nature of the world we live in.
She evoked the ephemeral beauty in nature in crystalline forms: snowdrops and dewdrops form embroideries on organza, manipulated snowberries punctuate silk peaks. White petals of tulle cascade on smocked, ruched and knotted dresses. Beyond her signatures, there is the expansion into the everyday and evening, with a more robust offering that also had commercial appeal: for the first time, inky blue denim and black round out her offering; in the show’s finale, a slew of gowns worthy of red carpet adulation like a navy satin dress with a smocked drop waist and a satin cape or an ivory high neck gown stacked with ruffles and rich floral embroidery.
There are collaborations on board too—on accessories with bags by Polène (available in April), in box and sphere silhouettes, and millinery by Stephen Jones, who works with Christian Dior and Thom Browne. In the last year, Dover Street Market Paris took Pierce under their wing to support the brand’s distribution and production. Until next year.
Writer Paul McLauchlan caught up with Róisín before her show.
What would you like us to know about this collection?
Every collection is based around what I’m thinking and this time, I was reflecting on things that don’t last, the ephemeral. I wanted it to have this strong message to appreciate the now and to fully live in the present. It’s a beautiful thing to not look to the past too much or too far into the future. [My mother Angie, who works on every piece with me and] I captured that through our techniques and our embroideries made in France, like crawling snowflakes that we smocked and beautiful silk velvet that felt pure and fresh like snow.
How are you building on last season?
We work with similar techniques that we’re constantly improving, so the execution of this collection was important to us. We developed some of our tailoring, too. Of course, there is the change in colour too, like blue, which reflects the calmness of the sky, to black. There are things that could reach a wider audience.
Could you tell us more about the collaborations this season?
Polène invited me to design a series of leather crafts, so I applied what I do to that project, taking older traditions and techniques into it. With the bags, I wanted to create something sculptural and intricate, with detailed lattice forms around boxes and spheres, that also captured our poetic world but in leather. It was a new way of working for us.
When I met Stephen Jones, there was a beautiful synergy and connection between us. He was very interested in my interest in nature. When I met him, I brought him a little envelope of sculptural rare flowers that I had just discovered. He wanted to bring those natural forms into the headpieces.
The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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