Alison Conneely
Alison believes the focus on responsible design and commitment to slow fashion that many Nordic brands have is essential for the future of fashion.
Alison is a multi-award winning designer, creative director and educator. Most recently, Alison presented a project in support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, girls and young people. Alison collaborated with artist Jesse Jones as costume director for Jones’s film ‘Tremble Tremble’ commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017and was selected by the National Museum of Decorative Arts and History to commemorate the 1916 Centenary.
Her project ‘The Shuttle Hive: A Century of Rising Threads’ explored through the lens of the modernist movement, the agency of revolt and myth, as identity paradigm for Irish women, is inspired by the project of Irish independence.
Alison is an intuitive and visceral designer whose practice is motivated by how Irish design can link the past and the present. What it is to live in the present, threading through a mythological past, stitching a more reflexive future? Her design thinking touches on aspects of shared community and politics.
Alison believes that fashion can be a vehicle for social, political and environmental change. In her latest project with the UNFPA, Alison designed a number of emblematic silk scarves entitled ’We Come in Reveries of Change’. She sees the scarves as ‘interventions, stories reclaimed and retold, wearable actions, wearable solidarity, and declarations of bodily autonomy’.
The project’s aim is to increase visibility and funds for the agencies who are on the ground in territories worldwide, providing vital maternal healthcare. The project is a response to inequity in judicial systems, domestic violence, the plight of refugees, land protection, global reproductive rights and climate justice.
Growing up in Connemara, Co. Galway, on the Ardbear peninsula, Alison describes the landscape of her playground as a ‘dramatic yet isolating canvas with vast, wind-swept moorland, meandering harsh Atlantic shoreline, isolated hawthorn trees, narrow winding roadways drifting into famine speckled mountains’.
She now has a clearer understanding of how growing up in Ireland has influenced her work and how a storytelling generation, pining for an era where people once populated the landscape as peasants, banshees, and other wandering souls, has shaped her designs.
Alison feels that Nordic design pairs comfort and practicality with self-expression and individuality beautifully, and that comfort and practicality are often overlooked in Western cultures due to patriarchal social norms.
She notes that men’s attire is almost exclusively comfortable, and in a world where so much is demanded of women, their clothing should support their needs, not what society dictates. Alison believes the focus on responsible design and commitment to slow fashion that many Nordic brands have is essential for the future of fashion.