Galway native Rory Parnell-Mooney burst onto the London fashion scene last year with his wildly acclaimed Central Saint Martins MA collection, referencing ecclesiastical garb. The menswear designer has been going from strength to strength in a burgeoning London scene, showing with support from the hotbed of fresh talent that is Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East and stocking with retail mecca Dover Street Market.
You did your MA in Menswear at Central Saint Martins under Louise Wilson – how was that?
I did my BA at London College of Fashion and then I went on to do my MA at Central Saint Martins and I can’t talk highly enough of it. When I left my BA I really couldn’t have called myself a designer. I knew that I loved making clothes but I literally didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it. I feel like in the 18 months I spent at Saint Martins I completely became ‘a designer’ – making decisions about clothes and learning to do research. I’m so happy that I went there and I’m so happy that I went when I did as well, it was actually the driving force behind me doing anything afterwards. Louise was horrible to me but I think that was the reason that I did the work.
How do you think your work has developed since the MA?
I think a lot more about the work as being *product*. I still think about shows and making really interesting looks for shows but I think that Saint Martins was all about show. They never said, ‘let’s consider the length of that sleeve,’ or think about topstitching or whatever, it was always thinking about the show. I think now from working with Fashion East and going to Paris to sell twice a year you have to start thinking about product and real clothes. I think sometimes that can sound sort of like a dirty word, to commercialise a product, but it’s actually really interesting to learn about what people will and won’t wear. People will wear really crazy shit – the most nuts stuff you’ve ever seen – but it’s very interesting to see why they buy it. A lot of Asian stores buy stuff that’s really very worked on, really handmade fabrics but in simple shapes. They won’t wear wacky 3D volume but they will wear crazy textiles. It’s been a learning curve for me as to why people wear things, and it’s really interesting. I feel I’ve refined the product since the MA and made it more commercial but made it more luxury, and made it better.
You showed recently at the tenth anniversary of London Fashion Week MAN – how do you feel menswear is developing since its inception?
I think it’s amazing what Topman and Fashion East have done together in this show and what it’s done for menswear in London. It was ten years, so twenty shows, and I think in that time and the reason that they started doing the MAN show is that every good men’s designer here has come from that show. There’s something very fresh about exploring menswear, there is something very open and interesting about it. I would never want to say that people are breaking boundaries, but it’s almost as though those parameters of just designing a suit jacket have been lifted in the last ten years. Now fashionable or expensive men’s clothes don’t have to be tailoring, they can be really beautiful things.
What is your approach to designing for men?
I think I basically design for myself, but the ‘me’ who had the balls to wear what I design! Like, if I was really confident but the same person then I would dress exactly how I dress men. The same person as me but who will just wear anything. I try everything on in the studio, I love clothes and how they fit, and trying it on again. It’s almost like living in it, seeing how they wear in, it’s part of the design process. We don’t just draw a whole collection and then make it – instead we do some drawings, then we make some stuff, we change some stuff from there. There’s a lot of toile-ing and changing, and maybe finding another fabric that’s really similar or that’s really opposite to it. Playing with lots of differences in things, like maybe a soft silk with a rough denim to contrast against it. As pretentious as it sounds it’s a very organic way of working, I don’t send some drawings off to a factory and wait for it to come back, and it’s a very hands-on process.
Do you feel growing up in Ireland has had any influence on your design work?
This may sound bad but growing up in a small rural town in Ireland made me want to rebel against it. My mum is English and moved to Galway where she met my dad, so she was always the outsider, she was always the ‘English one’. I suppose growing up as kids we always felt like the outsiders and I think people thought we were into really weird stuff so when I got to secondary school I kind of wanted to embrace that and to annoy people and be really weird. I would wear stupid stuff just to fuck people off and I think that has always been with me, that rebellious streak. I don’t take direction very well, I’m quite stubborn, and I think growing up somewhere that was so different to how we were raised by my mum that I just wanted to annoy people.
What was the starting point for your latest collection?
The last collection, Spring Summer 16 largely references Malevich because that was on at the Tate, last summer. It was a retrospective of all of his work, and there was this almost angry sense of protest in all of his work that he did. He was painting in turn-of-the-century Russia, and the Russian government wanted him to do all of these beautiful scenes of lush green grass and farmers and stuff, and he was like, no, I’m going to paint a black square so fuck you. That filtered into last season a lot and playing with this idea of protest and playing with opposites: drawing a very perfect square but the underlying message of it is disorder and protest. We brought that into a lot of the fabrics, pleating that couldn’t be controlled and then very square angular cut outs.
What music do you have playing in the studio?
We work in a basement studio with no windows so sometimes I put on the radio to feel connected to the outside world just in case anything massive happens! We listen to a lot of Radiohead, I force everyone to listen to a real mixed bag of stuff, loads of Placebo, Alanis Morrisette, Kate Bush, loads of ’90s music actually, quite unfashionable music. Sometimes I even play early U2, which is so embarrassing, but one of their first albums is real angsty and great, and I love Sinead O’Connor too.
Rory Parnell Mooney is stocked at Nowhere, 64 Aungier Street, Dublin 2, for more see www.roryparnellmooney.co.uk
Words: Honor Fitzsimons
