Laura Kinsella’s acclaimed collections of intricately detailed yet boldly sculptural millinery have seen her awarded both Breakthrough Designer 2014 and Milliner of the Year 2015 at the KFW Irish Industry Awards, and secured her spot in the ID2015-curated exhibition In The Fold and Unfold: Irish Designers Collective at London Fashion Week.
What led you into millinery?
Well I had studied fashion design at Limerick School of Design, and from there I went on to work for a designer called Alejandra Quesada in Mexico City. After that I went travelling for a year, and then I ended up in Melbourne where I worked for a design duo. I came back from working in Melbourne, right in the middle of the recession, and I began to look for work. I found a FÁS work placement programme and there were two internships – one with a knitwear designer and one with a milliner, I weighed it up and I took the millinery one. I thought I might have taken that and gotten back into doing fashion womenswear, but I never did, I just found I loved millinery. So I went on to London from there to do an internship with Philip Treacy, came back home, thinking to myself ‘What am I doing, what am I doing?’ *[laughs]* Then I just thought – let’s go for it, and I set up on my own, and here I am now!
What inspired your work?
Initially, I really loved Martha Lynn’s work, how clean and bold, bright and geometric her hats where. She was starting out here around when I began and I loved how her hats could be fun, without the sort of traditional materials that are used in millinery, like anything too frilly or with loads of flowers and feathers. I’m not a frilly sort of girl at all. I like clean lines, minimalism, engineering, I like order to things! I’m obsessed with clean lines and markings, that’s what really started it all.
What techniques do you use?
I started out knowing a lot of different textile techniques, and I can kind of do most things. Sometimes people can pigeon hole me into one thing and they don’t really realise I can make a lot more. I created some large felt fedoras, and people were surprised I could make those too, but I am a milliner!
Getting back to what I’m doing at the moment – I’m knitting, and making structures out of wire from a shape that I either draw out or is just out of my head. Then I bead that wire to a pattern. It takes hours as I mould the wire first, individually wrap each bead on, and mark it so that it’s exactly in place. If there’s one bead out of place it throws off the whole pattern. So I wrap the Japanese glass beads and pull the Irish linen waxed thread through.
The new collection is a mixture of pieces with with wire structures, where that loosely knitted thread is then stiffened so they almost look like cages, and then other pieces without the wire structure, which are left to drape softly. I like to be quite technical with my work, I really enjoy that aspect to it.
You’ve also collaborated a few times with fashion designer Danielle Romeril, could you tell us a little about that?
We were chatting one day about her wanting to get leather baseball caps made and I mentioned that I worked on loads of baseball caps when I worked for Phillip Treacy for a menswear collection, they were in leather, ponyskin, and wool. When I worked at Phillip Treacy it was coming up to Couture Week, and we were doing Armani Couture, as well as a few others, so Danielle got in touch for the next season and we began to collaborate on the hats, going through all the mood boards, colours, swatches, and what she roughly wanted. I went away and developed around four or five toiles and we went over and back on the designs. The stylist Kieran Kilgannon looked at the pieces and there was one hat, the oversized visor, that was supposed to be in two parts, but he took away one of the parts of it and it became a hugely successful piece.
It was brilliant. Collaborating is actually one of my favourite things to do because you’re restricted, in a sense, because it’s someone else’s vision, but you have to maintain your voice in the process too. I just find it so interesting and I would love to do more of them.
With your background in fashion design and career now in millinery, do you find they differ for you or do you find that they complement each other?
I think that it’s definitely been to my benefit because I think that there a lot of milliners who don’t come from a fashion background, so I think that they look at things differently. They don’t seem to do the thing where they start off with the mood and the colour and the swatching. I think because of that, that background in fashion design gave me a base in that and looking at a piece in terms of a whole look rather than separately, and I think that’s what makes my work stand out. The two *[fashion and millinery]* are also different with things like production – millinery is so one-off, people will come to me and like a piece but want it a little bit different, I find it very hard to be ‘ready-to-wear’. But apart from that, there are a lot of cross-overs like the materials I would use or the colours, which I keep very fashion-based.
So if someone pops along to your studio in Portobello – what happens?
They firstly can contact me, make an appointment to come over, usually they will try on lots of different hats, and they will usually have an outfit or a colour that they need to match. So they try on everything, look at the shape, whether something needs to be a little lower or a little higher, how the hat sits differently around the face or how it changes, then we would go with a lead time on what they want made. You’re one-on-one with people all of the time. With clothes you make it and send it into the shop and you kind of give it over at that point, whereas with what I do from start to finish it’s mine. It’s tough sometimes, but I do enjoy it.
For more of Laura’s work, check out www.laurakinsella.com
Words: Honor Fitzsimons
