Brenda Aherne and Helen Delany are the innovative duo behind punchy knitwear label Electronic Sheep. Growing up next to one other in Dublin and cutting their teeth together at NCAD, their distinct fusion of fashion and graphic design has garnered praise from the likes of Vogue, I-D, and Elle, gained stockists worldwide, and features each season at London Fashion Week.
Hi Helen. Electronic Sheep is you and Brenda – how did you two meet?
It’s a bit of a long story, so I’ll give you the short version! Brenda and I grew up next door to each other and became really into music and art at the same time. So the plan was to either run away with a band or plan to go to art college. We got a taste of London at around the age of 16 or 17, and decided we wanted to go to college in London, that was the master plan! We were actually both offered places in the NCAD, I did graphic design and she did fashion. I had no real interest in fashion apart from my own clothes, I didn’t have any desire to pattern cut or anything. I did graphic design but it was more as a way to do illustration, so it had more to do with visual communication at NCAD, like understanding how to design typography.
What’s it like to have a business with your best friend? How do your aesthetics meet?
I suppose it kind of happened as an accident. We didn’t sit down and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do’, it was more after we graduated we felt we needed to leave. Dublin has great opportunities for creative work now and it’s very vibrant, but when we left college there wasn’t really lots of choice work-wise. So we both left and worked in different countries, I went to London, and then New York, and then to Italy for a while and worked in all sorts of creative areas – art direction, photography, multimedia and magazines, whereas Brenda went to Germany and set up an accessories label and worked as a knitwear technologist. So the process of setting up Electronic Sheep didn’t happen for a while, as we were off working separately, being in different countries, seeing different things and developing aesthetics.
Brenda then returned home and she won an award to set up a company and she needed immediate graphics, a logo, and a name, I was roped in! Then we would bounce ideas back and forth and the Electronic Sheep came out of that, even though Brenda was doing the knit on her own and the knit didn’t have the graphics, she was experimenting a lot with them. I had done this typographic project and Brenda asked if she could integrate it and little by little it grew, we had a few events and so somehow I ended up with a company in Ireland! It comes quite naturally to work together, and the progression, I guess just being friends and having experienced so much together there’s no big arguments on what we think looks good or bad or whatever.
Tell us about your collection for AW15. Inspirations?
This collection is a bit more kitsch and retro. We were kind of staying away from that for a little while as it became quite popular, but it’s what we really like. A few things kind of came up, a friend of ours was making a doll’s house, and I’ve been collecting loads, and so was Brenda, and it’s funny because we find we start to collect the same things around the same time, and something we both stumbled upon was collecting these dolls. The plan was that we would somehow get some dolls into the collection, and next thing you know – they *are* the collection!
When we’re researching a collection we like to keep it quite loose, sometimes a different theme can emerge and for this one the dolls took over. We brought in a doll’s house into our research, as we did stuff on interiors before and they were quite unusual, having whole couches on scarves you can make up was quite playful. We try to push the illustrations as far as we can within the technology, we’ve drawn three floors of a dolls house. I like to include little hidden references like the tiles in the bathroom are famous tiles from a film called Performance, the one with Mick Jagger. There’s magazines with whole covers on the floor, and in the kitchen there’s a little can of Coke, you can’t see the full detail, but we know it’s a can of Coke which is quite fun, and we get a little kick out of those details. We don’t just fling everything on, we have to work out how it’s going to look and where it’s going to land on the body. We put a lot of pattern in so the mix balances it all out and doesn’t make the garments too difficult to wear.
Do you do a lot of drawing or do you work from the computer more?
For the beginning of a collection it’s all very hands-on, we wouldn’t really research on the computer at all, so most of it is done by things that we’ve been collecting naturally, as designers collecting things that we are naturally interested in. We have a bit of an archive at this stage as we’ve been collecting things for nearly 20 years, since we were kids. I still have a collage on my wall in my mother’s house in Dublin from when I was in NCAD, so sometimes I would just take things off that for projects. Brenda too, she’s got boxes of stuff. Between us we would have a lot of scrapbook stuff or museum research, so we would look into those to get something different, we would rarely go on the computer to look something up, that more comes in at the technical side of making something. There’s so much out there that’s accessible and it’s our job as designers to be more creative. We’re not high street and we’re not a massive luxury label so our job is not to conform, and our luxury, being small, is that we get to do something fresh and something new and from our perspective.
What’s next on the cards for Electronic Sheep?
Well this collection Doll House comes out in August, and we’re also working on our next collection for AW16. The next thing that’s happening is that we’re going to be in the Science Museum in London, so we have some Planet Scarves based on images of the troposphere. We’re also doing a film for this collection called ‘Dolls House’ with Margarita Louca and Slashstroke magazine, it was shown at London Fashion Week in February and final film will show at Aesthetica Short Film Festival.
Electronic Sheep is stocked at Scout, 5 Smock Alley Court, Essex Street West, Dublin 8. For more, see www.electronicsheep.com
Words: Honor Fitzsimons
