BT’s fingers on fashion pulse

EUROPEAN catwalks aren’t the only places to see new fashion this month. Brown Thomas Dublin’s Create initiative returns with a pop-up installation featuring 13 esteemed and emerging Irish designers of fashion, accessories, millinery, graphic print and textile design.

The showcase runs throughout September and customers will have the opportunity to meet the hands and minds behind the items in-store. An exhibition of eight exquisite pieces by the late Sybil Connolly, Ireland’s greatest couture designer, will be there to admire and inspire. Launched in 2011, Create is Brown Thomas’s most far-reaching initiative that involves home-grown talent but by no means its first. In 1983, then-buyer Marie McCarthy purchased Louise Kennedy’s entire graduate collection. The pieces were presented like Prada by creative director John Redmond (then visual merchandiser), taking up three of the flagship’s Grafton Street windows. Kennedy opened last year’s Create showcase.

“It was a great honour to have to work with such an amazing company, to learn so much from their buyers and merchandisers and understand the high standards required to survive in this very competitive industry,” says Kennedy. “This assuredness allowed me to develop my collections each season and it placed them on a platform unrivalled by any other luxury department store [in Ireland].” Other successful Irish brands involved with BT have included Orla Kiely, Mary Grant and Pauric Sweeney.