Helen Steele: The female form is to be celebrated in all shapes and sizes

Celebrating three years of the Helen Steele x Dunnes Stores collaboration Ruth O’Connor catches up with the designer to talk about her mood-boosting latest collection ‘On Track’ which is designed with wellbeing in mind.

Sat, 29 Jan, 2022 - 18:15

Ruth O'Connor

Helen Steele’s latest collection for Dunnes Stores has everything you need to get active this spring including hoodies, leggings, jackets, and swimsuits. As well as it being great performance wear, admirers of Steele’s aesthetic can tap into it for a fraction of the cost of one of her beautiful silk dresses or scarves.

Steele says that customer feedback influences how she thinks about the clothes she designs. This was particularly the case at the start of the pandemic, when shops had to close and people largely turned to shopping online.

“I got great feedback from customers about what they were looking for in terms of clothing, sizing issues, and so on,” she says.

“When it is firsthand information like that, I think you remember it and feed it into future collections.

“People were telling me how important exercise was for them — how going for a walk nearly became their night out. We brought out a lot of soft, tactile, comfort clothing and loungewear at the time too in response to how people were feeling.

“Life is different now. Things are very fluid and the clothing is adaptable to people’s needs and comfort requirements. You can throw on your leggings, stick your phone in your pocket, and measure your steps — you don’t have to be full-on going to the gym.

“People send me pictures of them wearing leggings with a glass of prosecco in their hand. The clothes are multi-purpose and for everyone — from busy mums to people working from home at their computers.”

Those familiar with Steele’s art and fashion design will know that she loves to incorporate colour into her work and, since her college days, she has been fascinated by the therapeutic power of colour.

“What keeps coming back to me is an understanding of the power of colour and how positive that can be,” she says. “It is something that we really try to incorporate into the designs at Dunnes Stores. With every print we do, we try to have both uplifting and balancing colours.”

Steele says that developing the collection with the in-house team at Dunnes (which includes a triathlete, a sea swimmer, and a yogi) has been a terrific learning curve over the past three years. While she had previously designed stage clothing for performers such as Rita Ora and Jessie J, she says that innovation in fabric since then means that the quality and durability of the fabrics used at Dunnes is far superior.

In many cases, she says, our fabrics are better than those used by leading sportswear brands and the attention to detail in terms of print is a key point of interest.

“We create clothing in an extremely considered way. I don’t know if there are other design teams working on that level. We are almost painfully scientific with our colours,” she says of the team at Dunnes.

The collection is designed in Ireland to suit the market here: “We are considering women in Ireland and what they require in terms of clothing. It is about reflecting what people need and want.”

The current collection goes from size 8 to 24, with size inclusivity of great personal importance to Steele. Her daughter Halle, a plus-sized model, has featured in Steele’s photo shoots for her own brand and for Dunnes. Having gone through many years of weight loss and weight gain due to an eating disorder, Steele believes she has a responsibility as a designer to create clothing to suit a wide range of people.

“The female form is to be celebrated in all shapes and sizes, and I think it is wrong as a designer not to embrace that,” she says. “The great thing about Instagram is the feedback that I get from people on this subject — I’ve had people telling me that my collection for Dunnes gave them the confidence to actually leave the house and go walking with friends.”

Steele is very active so has good insight into what she needs activewear to do. She was diagnosed with ADHD in her late-30s and says that exercise is “like a form of therapy”.

“I try to run three times a week, I walk every day, and do yoga and pilates. There are also days when I sit on the couch and doodle and eat pizza and drink wine,” she says, although she admits that the pandemic has tested her recovery from the eating disorder and the recovery of many of the people she met in therapy.

She says that she was not surprised when she got the ADHD diagnosis and that it changed her life for the better.

“The one thing that was constant was the drawing and painting and the hyperactivity,” she says of life before diagnosis.

“My concentration was appalling and I was never able to stick to anything. I was always just known as a ‘bold child’ and a ‘disruptive teenager’… In women and girls it [the symptoms] can be more internal than visible,” she explains.

“I think the diagnosis helped me to become more confident in myself, instead of thinking ‘Am I going mad?’ There are still things I might do or say that most other people wouldn’t do or say, I don’t get things 100% right all the time and I have had to learn to live with it, but if I hadn’t got the diagnosis and the correct medication, I don’t know if I’d still be here, to be honest. It was relief more than anything and has turned what were negatives into positives.”

The pace of creating her collection for Dunnes Stores suits her, she says.

“I love the pace with Dunnes as it is so fast and we work very far ahead. It has been a terrific learning curve to work at that level and it kind of inspires me to work harder on my own collections too.”

Working on both the prints and the overall clothing designs, she says she loves seeing people’s reactions to the new collections and seeing how people style the garments.

“I was at a U2 concert in Sydney in 2019 and saw a woman wearing one of my jackets from Dunnes. I was thrilled. I used to go up to talk to people who were wearing my designs, but my kids told me it was really embarrassing and ‘a bit desperate’,” she laughs. “But I love it so much when I see people wearing the collections.”