The Irish Designers To Know Right Now

There is a version of this list that runs on sentiment — tweed, mist, a nod to the ancestors. Ignore it. The case for Irish design in 2026 is structural, not romantic. A man from Magherafelt runs Dior. A Dubliner is arguably the most consequential independent designer in London. And a fashion week in Dublin, barely a year old, has put the country's heritage mills, its graduates and its most serious young labels behind one set of doors. The talent was never the missing piece. The infrastructure was.

The two with actual leverage

Simone Rocha has shown in London since 2010 and needs no endorsement. Her autumn/winter 2026 collection, shown at Alexandra Palace on 23 February, drew on Tír na nÓg, Perry Ogden's photographs of 1990s Dublin youth, and the Yeats sisters — Elizabeth and Lily, the printers and embroiderers rather than the poet. Antique-toned wools with a hand-me-down weight, patched white lace, hand-embroidered florals, ribbon-laced seams left mid-unravel, crinoline under sportswear. The same show carried her adidas Originals collaboration — the brand's first women's-focused project with her — in pearl-encrusted track jackets and rhinestone-studded ballerina sneakers. Underneath sit stores in London, New York and Taiwan, and wholesale through Selfridges, Mytheresa and Bergdorf Goodman.

Jonathan Anderson operates at a different scale. Born in Magherafelt, he began on the shop floor at Brown Thomas in Dublin before founding JW Anderson and rebuilding Loewe. In 2025 he was appointed creative director of Dior, the first person since Christian Dior himself to hold menswear, womenswear and haute couture simultaneously. On 4 December he brings Dior's pre-fall collection to the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin — the first Dior show staged on the island of Ireland. The invitation carries a four-leaf clover, a motif he has used repeatedly since arriving.

Showing at Trinity College Dublin is a dream come true. I began my career in fashion in Dublin, so returning here feels deeply personal. — Jonathan Anderson

Craft as an argument, not a costume

Róisín Pierce makes the strongest case for technique as content rather than decoration. Working almost entirely in white, she builds sculptural forms from crochet, smocking, Mountmellick embroidery and Irish lace — the skills Irish women were once confined to, used as a language of release rather than penance. She shows in Paris on the official calendar; Alexa Chung wore her Two For Joy design to the 2023 Met Gala. In 2026 she took the Golden Fleece Special Merit for Irish Craft Excellence. The operation stays deliberately tiny, much of it handled in-house with her mother, Angela.

Richard Malone, from Wexford, holds the other end of it. An LVMH Prize finalist in 2019, Woolmark Prize winner in 2020 and Golden Fleece recipient in 2023, he has work held by MoMA, the V&A and the National Gallery of Victoria. His practice now spans sculpture, installation and performance as much as garment-making, drawing on stitching, curtain-making and metalwork learned in rural Ireland to interrogate class and gendered labour.

The body, precisely

Sinéad O'Dwyer is the most technically interesting pattern cutter of this generation, and the only one whose subject is fit itself. A Royal College of Art graduate who launched her label in 2021, she works across a genuinely broad size range with adaptive construction — hardware that lets a garment change with the wearer rather than fix her at one measurement — and casts models of varying sizes and abilities as method, not gesture. On 28 July 2026 she presented Notice Me in the Raphael Gallery at the V&A for Fashion in Motion: technical nylon dresses, sharp tailoring, liquid sequins, neon handprints, ghillie-inspired mules made with Tabitha Ringwood.

Two ways to build a business

Robyn Lynch has spent two years proving a London menswear label can grow without a runway. Westminster, 2018; NEWGEN; four on-schedule collections between 2022 and 2024; then a deliberate stop in favour of showrooms, campaigns and direct sales. The work is workwear-shaped, genderless, brightly coloured and funny. The Irishness is in the references, not the swatch: she redesigned the Guinness Storehouse staff uniforms for its 25th anniversary, made uniforms for V&A East, dresses Fontaines D.C., and has a first Geox footwear collaboration arriving this year.

Aoife McNamara built the opposite kind of company. Run from a thatched cottage on the main street in Adare, Co Limerick, hers is Ireland's first B Corp certified fashion house, and the material development is the point — a seaweed-derived textile, a fully Irish wool cloth. In February 2026 she took a lived-in house concept, The AMN World, onto the official Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule instead of a runway.

A house learning to continue

Paul Costelloe died on 22 November 2025, aged 80 — the only designer to have shown at every London Fashion Week since the schedule began. His house is now led by his son William Costelloe, previously design director there for seven years. His first collection as creative director went out at the Waldorf on 21 February 2026: structured shoulders, sculpted silhouettes, British and Irish cloths, many chosen by his father before his death. He calls it an evolution rather than a reinvention, which is the correct answer and the harder one.

What happens in Dublin in October

Ireland Fashion Week runs 7–12 October, its second edition themed Damhsa. It matters less as spectacle than as a shared address — the heritage tier, Magee 1866, Avoca, IrelandsEye, Jack Murphy, Louis Copeland and Triona, alongside contemporary labels, McNamara among them.

The two to watch are the two the awards jury already picked. Rachel Maguire, who works as RASHIIID, took Breakthrough Designer of the Year in March; her faux-fur accessories and custom pieces have been worn by Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion, Ariana Grande and SZA, and in May she made accessories with Three Ireland around Doja Cat's 3Arena date. She is refreshingly unromantic about the celebrity pipeline, having been burned by it. Sasha Donnellan took Young Designer of the Year: ESMOD Paris-trained, working between London and Mayo, pushing bridal softness against military structure and building her debut partly from lace and organzas donated through Vision Ireland. Helen Steele, the Monaghan painter and printmaker, has the strongest colour sense on the schedule.

Then The Irish Edit, a showroom giving thirty brands a rail, a stand and one model each — headlined by two Derry designers, Aoife Harvey of AH Designs, who won BBC's A Stitch Through Time, and Bray Zhang, an ATU Donegal graduate who cuts Donegal tweed against Chinese silk. Better than a runway for judging whether clothes are well made.

What we could not verify

Richard Malone's current fashion output is unclear from public sources; his recent activity reads as art practice, and we could not confirm a 2025 or 2026 ready-to-wear collection. Nor could we confirm Irish stockists for Pierce, O'Dwyer or Lynch, or pricing for the Rocha adidas range; venues for most Ireland Fashion Week shows were unpublished at the time of writing. Colin Horgan, long a fixture of these lists, announced his label's closure in May 2025 and wound it down that June; we found no confirmed relaunch, and left him out on that basis rather than from any doubt about the work.

What has changed is not that Ireland produces good designers — it always did, and mostly exported them. It is that there is now somewhere for them to land. Anderson brings Dior to Trinity in December. Rocha shows in London and sells in Taiwan. Pierce shows in Paris and cuts in Dublin. And for six days in October, most of the rest are in one city at once. That was not true before.