With party season pending, our thoughts turn to festive fashion. Opera Lane has been influenced by the lady eclectic – a colourful muse inspired by the maximalism of the 70s and early 80s where baubles and furs flirt shamelessly with masculine cuts and heaps of attitude.

Your summer holiday is less than a week away, you never shifted that extra weight from Christmas, you didn’t get to the gym past February and now you’re dreading your holiday pics hitting FaceBook. It’s time to learn the cheat’s guide of how to look good in photographs.

From fashion designers to actors and businesswomen to models, the next generation of young Irish people has thrown up some significant talent across a range of professions. These young people are among a pool of highly-accomplished achievers whose remarkable successes to date are bucking recessionary trends and putting their country back on the map.

Who chooses who becomes a supermodel? Deirdre Reynolds meets the people who make it happen