Sinéad O’Dwyer is making a business as well as clothes

Sinéad O’Dwyer knows all about firsts. In lieu of September’s London Fashion Week, the Irish designer is debuting her spring/​summer collection in the land of hygge, The Little Mermaid, and expensive foraging restaurants.

She’s the second recipient of the Zalando Visionary Award, in which the winner is given a career-changing €50,000 and a slot on the much-respected Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule. Sinéad has been prepping for this moment for five months.

“I selected all of our yarns, elastic colours, and satin for this season in March,” she says, Zooming in from the Copenhagen apartment in which she’s been staying for the last week.

Having previously presented her collections as part of LFW’s Newgen cohort, at the Old Selfridges space off Oxford Street, Sinéad is all set to make a change for SS25.

“I’m quite excited to be able to do something different and have the capacity to do things like the set design,” she tells us, tantalisingly.

It’s unsurprising the London-based Royal College of Art graduate took home the Zalando Award.

Since the launch of her eponymous label in 2018, Sinéad has been whipping up designs that span a gamut of sizes, fashioned to hug and worship the bodies of people from all walks of life (see: Karoline Vitto and Michaela Stark for two other designers that share her school of thought).

Now, for a designer of her level, receiving a substantial amount of financial help can be the difference between being able to make both sound and profitable choices or not.

“Small, independent brands take a long time to become profitable because you have to build your infrastructure,” she says. “[Awards like this] are the sort of things that help keep you going and being able to invest in new techniques and better opportunities for sales. Making clothes and designing is actually such a small part of it.”

While Sinéad’s AW24 was a curious study of the office worker, SS25 is ​“trippy”, featuring ​“water and brightness”. And, of course, more firsts.

“My work is always very nostalgic for firsts in a way. I’ve been reflecting a lot on a year I spent in North Carolina when I was 16; it was the first time I fell in love that summer,” says the designer – about to make the Danish capital fall in love with her, too.

Hey Sinéad! How did it feel when you found out that you were getting the Zalando award?

[I was] super excited. I applied hoping [to win] but I didn’t expect to win. It’s such an amazing opportunity to do a standalone show in Copenhagen, which is a really interesting fashion week in terms of the emphasis on sustainability.

This is an award that focuses on structural issues, whether that’s to do with sustainability or in our case to do with sustainability, sizing, and inclusive design. So it’s really exciting to be awarded this opportunity.

You’re ordinarily on the London Fashion Week schedule. What interested you about Copenhagen?

I still love showing at London Fashion Week but they’re just very different. Everything is still quite small at Copenhagen Fashion Week. Even just in terms of this [Zalando Visionary] award application I had to fill out – [it had] this extensive survey on my practice in terms of sustainability. So there’s a strong ethic around the practices of brands showing at Copenhagen Fashion Week.

That’s not to say that [the same practices] aren’t present at London Fashion Week, but I suppose Copenhagen has been – and still is – known for innovation and research in sustainable materials. With this award, I was paired with a mentor [Dio Kurazawa from The Bear Scouts] whose focus is sustainable supply chains. {And] I’ve had the opportunity to meet lots of people whose focus is supply chain, product development or sales with sustainability or innovative materials as a priority. It’s been fun!

When Paolina Russo won the Zalando Visionary Award last year, their show was inspired by prehistoric stone circles. What have you got for us?

With the set design, we’re referencing some of my original work and cast. We’ll have Jade [O’Belle] walking the show again, who is my longtime great friend, and also an artist; she was the muse for one of the original body casts I did during my MA.

I have quite a few of our longtime models coming from the UK [but] we’re casting the rest of the show in Denmark. We’ve already had 12 looks confirmed on international models.

I worked with a writer Anastasiia Fedorova to create a poem [and] again with Cosha and Witch Trials on the music. The poem tells the story of the collection, it’s very sensual, it’s quite erotic and it has a real material focus for me. We’re collaborating again with the Heron Foundation so we’re going to have blind and low vision guests at the show who are Danish. Blind and low-vision guests will have the option to listen to textural descriptions of the looks and they can also listen to the poem separately.

How do you feel about the collection?

I’m a bit nervous. I won’t be able to see it until the day of the show because it’s being made in Sweden and I’m like, ​“Oh no! What if I hate it?” I’m very practical, I make a lot myself, so I’m used to seeing things beforehand.

What are you most proud of this season?

I’m so excited about two new things: one is the denim category – that’s very key. The other is a technique I’m calling ​“puff” [which] incorporates a lingerie technique we’ve always used but with the structured pieces we’ve done for S/​S24, combining two worlds.

Had you spent much time in Copenhagen before this week?

Weirdly, I have a lot of connections to Denmark, because my wife is Danish but we met in New York. So I’ve been to Denmark a lot to visit her family. I also have an uncle who lives here and my wife and I have visited him a lot. We’re going to have a lot of my wife’s family and her grandmother [at the show]. My family’s coming too, so it’s nice.

Do you think you’ll be back here again?

That would definitely depend on Zalando. I wouldn’t have the capacity to come to Copenhagen again. I love showing in London and this coming February would be my final Newgen show and I wouldn’t want to miss that. But it’s amazing being here and I would be open to showing in Copenhagen again – it’s a beautiful city.