What will it take for fashion to become a more size-inclusive industry, from runway to shop floor? ELLE UK shines a light on the designers, models and advocates reimagining the body in fashion and pushing for a more size-inclusive industry for all.
With Paloma Elsesser, Björk, Arca and Precious Lee already wearing her intricate and avant-garde creations, plus a collaboration with the artist Love Bailey to create a conical-breast corset for Aquaria in RuPaul’s Drag Race, the designer Sinéad O’Dwyer is proving how exquisite clothes made for all bodies and sizes can be. ‘Working with different shapes is so much more exciting and rewarding, even just from a design point of view,’ she says.
Having grown up in the Irish town of Tullamore as an ‘artistic kid who was always making things’, O’Dwyer fell in love with fashion at age 12 after visiting a Philip Treacy and Isabella Blow exhibition in Dublin with her father. ‘I really connected with the drama of his pieces,’ she says. ‘I realised that the arts can give space for expressing emotion.’ She started off ‘making lots of strange hats’, but soon replaced millinery with fashion design.
Her work became more personal while doing her MA in fashion at the Royal College of Art in London: ‘It wasn’t until then that I realised I’d had an eating disorder since I was an adolescent,’ she says. ‘I’d gone through years of restrictive diets, obsessive eating patterns and self-hate, but it wasn’t something I had even identified as a problem.’
Spurred on by her tutors, O’Dwyer began to examine body acceptance through her work. In 2018, she graduated with a collection of brightly coloured, erotic silicone busts – life-cast from her muse, friend and fellow artist, Jade O’Belle. These pieces celebrated bodies as they are, rather than how fashion says they should be.
For her SS22 Domiciliary collection, O’Dwyer was inspired by her decade of work as a nanny, transforming domestic-service garments from the mundane to the radical: backless shirts with apron ties, tailoring with moulded busts, textured neon stretch fabrics, shibari techniques and elements of erotica. And the industry took notice: this year, the British Fashion Council declared her a recipient of its Newgen award.
O’Dwyer now eschews traditional patterns entirely and her sample size is between 18 and 22. ‘To wear pattern-cut garments is to wear another’s body on your own,’ she says. ‘People talk about how the same shapes have been in fashion for years, but that’s only because we’ve been using the same body.’
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This article appears in ELLE's September 2022 issue, available on newsstands from July 28.
