Offaly dress designer off to London for World Junk Kouture final
TUBBER student Eva Donlon will fly to Wembley, London on October 12 next along with her Moate Community School teammates to take part in the 2023 Junk Kouture World final.
'#TagME' designed by Eva, Evie Nugent and Méabh O'Shea from Moate Community School was chosen as one of 10 represenatives when the Irish fashion final took place in Dublin last Thursday.
Eva also modelled the dress which was made from plastic colour samples for various plastic objects.
The girls ingeniously used over 2,500 tags, handsewn together, thereby recycling and reusing samples which usually end up in landfill because the different colours make them difficult to recycle.
The girls explained the inspiration behind their design in the final programme: “As we’re interested in art and design we were greatly inspired by Missoni through her unique creations. Her creative designs are not only statement pieces, but they are works of art. We wanted to incorporate colourful patterns and designs into our dress, therefore we organised the tags into their various range of colors. When creating the headpiece, we wanted to embrace shape and movement, we decided to make four long trails of 528 white tags. When drilling each individual tag we drilled 12 holes, eight for purpose and four for design adding decorative appearance. Overall, we are delighted with the outcome.”
The winning design was one of two which Moate CS teacher Pamela Keogh guided to the Dublin final.
Under the supervision of teacher Luke Corley, the design they created attracted much attention, especially from photographers, and featured on the Irish Times.
The dress description in the programme for the final read: “The inspiration came from the amount of waste train tickets make as they aren’t reusable, but are very durable, meaning they can be turned into a wearable piece. The designers also got inspired by the Disney film, Beauty and the Beast, specifically the dress the main character Belle wears. Each ticket used in this dress are hand painted and sewn together using a sewing machine. The skirt is made from strips of tickets sewn together, and then those strips are attached to the underskirt, so they are secure. The top is a corset style top, which is made in the same way as the skirt.”
It was created from plastic bags, broken crayons and electrical cable and the description explained: “The story behind their creation Neon Electric is inspired by a brightly coloured neon sea slug and fashion designer Iris Van Herpan who created designs inspired by human anatomy. On looking at her collection ‘Sensory Seas’ the designers set about injecting movement and energy into their design. The designers experimented with different plastic bags to get the correct texture and colors for our design. They mainly focused on plastic as they felt that the amount of plastic waste in the world is far to much and hard to believe we are doing this to the environment and they wanted to put that idea into their design to show awareness.”
Music promoter and broadcaster Louis Walsh was one of the judges in the junk haute-couture design contest, along with social media creator and makeup artist Keilidh Cashell, DJ Tara Kumar and designer Stephen McLaughlin.
Louis Walsh said: “I’ve been judging Junk Kouture a long time and I can say it never gets any easier to choose the winners – but I think we’ve got this decision right! It was important we picked designs who really rocked the stage of 3Arena as the World Final is the biggest event in the Junk Kouture calendar – you’ve got to bring it to a new level! Best of luck to our top ten in London!”
The other Irish qualifiers for the world final are from schools in Donegal, Tipperary, Roscommon, Dublin, Louth, Limerick, Wicklow and Galway.
They will battle it out against 50 other teams from Abu Dhabi, London, Paris, Milan and New York in London to become the World Designer of the Year.
The Dublin final at the 3Arena can be watched on RTÉ 2 and RTÉ Player May 18 at 7pm and An Post have also launched a booklet of Junk Kouture stamps.