Richard Malone (Q9030)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Richard Malone is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Richard Malone |
Richard Malone is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Fall finds Richard Malone honing his design vocabulary in wondrous and tactile ways. The designer’s passion for his craft is felt in circle cuts, draping, side-tie tailoring, armor-shaped knits, and happy-making tights that ruffle around the leg like a ribbon on a maypole. They’re a perfect example of how Malone combines experimentation and fun in his work. This season, he says, there are “things that I feel are almost comedy or art-schooly, which is a comfortable place for us to sit as a brand, because the more I think about where it’s going as I’m producing clothes for people, I kind of identify with all of the characters who buy my clothes. There’s a sort of outsiderness.”That otherness is balanced by the hands-on materiality of Malone’s work, which is DIY minus the scrappiness. There’s an elegance to some of his draped pieces to rival that of Madame Grès. Another reason the designer’s experimental designs don’t come off as abstract is that they’re created for a flesh-and-blood customer rather than a fictive ideal.Malone’s unconventional designs are created using a neo-traditional model that is evolutionary rather than ever-changing, and values the personal and local. The designer works on what he calls a “degrowth” model, using dead stock and responsible materials. As such, made-to-order and limited editions are his focus. “Growth,” he says, “isn’t necessarily the outcome for what we do, like working with a very small community and making clothes for people.” Only a few of the colorful trench coats in this collection will be produced, for example, because there is a limited quantity of Mulberry leather remnants to make them with.Season after season Malone employs his own runic vocabulary to compose new chapters of a never ending story that relates less to time than to identity: “I think there’s something really identifiable in what I’ve done because it’s never been part of a zeitgeist,” he says. “It’s always been [about] celebrating strangeness.”
22 February 2022
“These fragments that I have shored against my ruins,” one of the most famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, provides a useful framework for thinking about Richard Malone’s spring collection. His clothes, made in part using fragments of materials, including scrap leather provided by Mulberry, were presented among Raphael cartoons at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.These artworks, intended to hang in the Vatican, are Renaissance treasures; within the usual hierarchy of art, they are more highly valued than fashion design. Who and what “counts” and/or is represented in art and fashion is a subject that preoccupies Malone, who became increasingly interested in Irish craft heritage and its relationship to place and language during lockdown. “I’ve really been thinking about being an immigrant in this country, coming here on my own and building this business, and then what gets to be celebrated and what we get to talk about,” the designer said in a pre-show chat.Without the possibility to engage in person with his team, spring’s collection was not built on conversations or a moodboard but out of nostalgia. The circular forms that appear throughout the collection were specifically inspired by the celebratory, decorative rosettes (resembling scrunchies, observed Malone) and armbands that the designer’s grandmother would carefully assemble by hand to commemorate horse meets and wins by the Gaelic Athletic Association. Home crafted with care, these happy, colorful rounds commemorate quotidian, humble joys. As such they stood in contrast to the monumental and classical narratives of the Raphael cartoons, which, to Malone, represent “good taste,” and perhaps also social class. “It fascinates me that my starting point was that very simple thing,” he said. During lockdown “I really got to assess what the meaning of making those things is, and what putting them in a space like the V&A and trying to make them elevated and interesting could mean. I think sometimes when you go to museums or you go to fashion stores, you can feel quite ashamed of your upbringing not being very conversationally valuable. Now I’m like, ‘Oh no, that’s the most valuable thing that I have.’”As an outsider, Malone brings a sense of realness and proportion (in the sense that he is committed to keeping his production runs small) to the smoke and mirrors world of fashion.
The setting of his show, the designer noted, “really heightened the fact that a lot of fashion is imitation, or it isn't real life.” But that’s a dichotomy that also plays out in his own work: “There’s one side of what I do that's quite theatrical and abstract, but then there’s also the real women that buy clothes from me, and men, and they’re such two different conversations,” he observed. “There is more than one truth in everything.”
19 September 2021
For plenty in fashion, the past year has posed something of an existential crisis, with the pausing of its machinations offering opportunity to reassess how things operate. “So many of the structures that uphold this system are smoke and mirrors,” reflects Richard Malone, “2020 has given people lots of time to think, to hopefully address and change our industry.” For the young Irish designer, who has built his brand with sustainability and equity at its core, what that meant was a doubling down on his principles—and addressing the supply chains often overlooked in conversations about progress.Malone hails from a working class Wexford background, where making—be it of buildings or of textiles—was key to the local community, hit hard by the 2008 recession. The realization that not only did people lose their jobs when heritage industries were outsourced, but equally the languages and histories embedded in those traditions, was formative to his practice. His latest collection explicitly explored those issues through the very fabrics he used: Irish linens made in Wexford from yarn sourced in the Mourne mountains, or wools handwoven in County Down. While many of his early collections leant into upcycled or repurposed fabrics to ensure their sustainability, “deadstock is really a reminder of a loss of craft,” he reflects now. “It doesn’t help solve structural problems, or sustain craft and culture.”Instead, this season he sought to preserve those cultural conversations by celebrating and emphasising the importance of every person in his supply chain—and compensating them accordingly (every one of them is paid above the London Living Wage £13 per hour for a trainee and £24 per hour for full-time staff.) Needless to say these sorts of spaces are historically the domain of women, and their eradication has the knock-on effect of propagating patriarchy. “It’s an expensive way of working, and undesirable in terms of the sorts of profit margins brands want to make, but you sort of have to take it on the chin because it’s collaborative and it’s what’s right,” he says. “I want things to stay being made here. There are amazing things happening here, in Ireland, or close by overseas, which we need to protect—otherwise we erase people’s voices, erase their language. Everyone deserves a voice.
”That female-centricity is the other key to the brand Malone has built: His designs revolve around the needs of his coterie of private clients, who require the showpieces he creates for them to be as practical as they are impactful. Rather than abstract narratives, it is the realities of those women who inform his collections: the sculptural shapes of his jackets enhanced by armholes cut for movement, or avant-garde effects achieved through layers which can be deconstructed as they wish. This season, as he often does, he looked to historical garments conceived with a foundation of functionality: to skirts and undergarments made adaptable to the body through ruching and ties, or the shapes of panniers or bustles, here padded with horsehair, which still allow for women to sit down while wearing them.It made for an offering that reflected the visual codes now core to his aesthetic, but progressing ever forward in terms of the narratives they amplify and the means of their production. “I’m just interested in the brand growing collectively,” he shrugs when asked what he hopes for his future. “Growing horizontally rather than vertically, and giving people equal billing.” After all: “Who decides what being a designer is? Is it me directing what it looks like, or is it the feedback from the people who actually buy it? Is it the people who make it? I want to take some responsibility for showing how things can be done differently.”
26 March 2021
There was a period near the beginning of lockdown when an army of young London-based designers joined forces to combat the terrifying lack of PPE available to the UK’s hospital workers at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis. With something of a make-do-and-mend mentality, they each transformed their studio spaces into workshops where, using pattern pieces produced by the Emergency Designer Network, they would operate in isolation and stitch together scrubs for otherwise unprotected doctors and nurses. “They would give you 20 packs and a week to sew them,” explains Richard Malone. “But I’m a quick sewer so I’d finish them in three days and then spend the other two sampling things or making toiles.”It was those months which became the genesis for the Irish designer's new collection, a period when, even without a team or regular resources at his disposal, he had the luxury of time: the opportunity to rifle through deadstock materials and hand-dye them in his bathtub, or tie them with twine and run them through his washing machine to achieve the right crinkled effect. “Because my language is very much making, perhaps lockdown wasn’t so bad for me,” he notes. “I could just do whatever I wanted in my studio. It was a distraction.”DIY as it was, what manifested is one of Malone’s most aesthetically opulent collections yet: velvets dramatically draped into floor-sweeping Grecian numbers; discarded theater curtains cut into body-con glamour or gathered around padded bustles. “They’re fabrics that lend themselves to lounging—the velour is like Juicy Couture tracksuit material,” he smiles. “It’s comfortable; it’s loungewear.” He was clearly going for a sense of comfort in the armor of sutured breastplates and the padding of cushioned hips. “It wasn’t intentional but I was trying everything on as I designed it and I suppose it was in response to the moment,” he reflects (Malone has always worked as his own fit model in the formative stages of his collections). “I hadn’t worn shoes for three months. Everything, the very idea of clothes, felt abstract.”The abundant historical allusions, too, were instinctual rather than referential. Without access to research libraries, “I was reliant on the guise of memory,” he says. “And I read a lot of books about time: Iain Reid, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ali Smith… I was interested in the idea of how all these different time periods can somehow exist at once.
” Cropped and gathered matador boleros, their shoulders warped into shrugs, evolved from the idea that “everything’s sort of fucked, so you shrug and you move on” rather than the usual archival imagery; corseted lace-up backs from the simple fact that Malone was having to somehow strap himself into the more elaborate numbers.
19 September 2020
Where some designers pay lip service to sustainable and ethical fashion, Richard Malone is fully committed. Alongside the show notes for his new collection was a mission statement outlining the details of his practices with full transparency, right down to the hourly rates (25 pounds an hour minimum) for the local cutters and tailors he employs. He certainly doesn’t do things by halves: When Malone isn’t repurposing or recycling fabric, the designer works exclusively with weavers or mills that have regenerative initiatives, using only organic, plant-derived, and azo-free dyes. Factor in the one-of-a-kind nature of his custom pieces and what you get is a truly considered rebuttal to throwaway fashion.Even still, it’s the desirability of Malone’s clothes that have sustained his made-to-order business thus far. Flared pantsuits have become a recurring theme on his runway, and today they showed up in particularly refined iterations, including an aubergine-colored ensemble that was belted at the waist and finished with contrast stitching. His more daring experiments with tailoring were worth a double take as well, including an asymmetric persimmon vest with a curvy waist that came with a matching maxiskirt.Malone inherited a fascination with corsetry from his late grandmother Nellie and has a knack for subverting the outerwear-underwear paradigm. He used utility-style harnesses to lend some rigor to the slinky ruched and gathered second-skin staples.Perhaps the big news on this collection is yet to come. This Monday, the Irish-born designer will be among the 10 finalists in the running for the International Woolmark Prize in London. Whatever the outcome, Malone has shown it is possible to compete on the global stage without compromising the environment.
14 February 2020
Richard Malone dedicated his show in London today to his grandmother, Nellie Malone, who passed away a few months ago. A regular fixture on Malone’s front row, Nellie was among a circle of strong women who have influenced him. In the show notes, the designer described the creative process as a means of exploring and overcoming his grief. The doodles and handwritten notes printed on long-sleeved mesh tees were touching reminders of his relationship with his grandmother.Though she had no formal education, Nellie had a wealth of fashion knowledge. Her love of corsetry showed up in subtle ways via the ruching along a pale blue body-con turtleneck top and moss green, nip-waisted sleeveless blazers. With a sizeable bespoke business, Malone is deeply connected to the craft of making clothes; he turned the inner workings of his tailoring inside out, and those curvilinear lines wrapped the body in flattering ways along pencil skirts and crombie coats.There was a marked emphasis on eveningwear this season, with a series of impressive floor-sweeping dresses fashioned from deadstock dancewear fabric. Malone’s growing private clientele of fashion insiders and art world types will likely appreciate this youthful, unorthodox, upcycled approach to black tie. The off-the-shoulder asymmetric red ball gown was a good example, and would get all the right attention at an art gala.Like many of his European fashion peers in London, Malone is personally affected by the looming prospect of a no-deal Brexit as an Irish passport holder. Though his status in the U.K. is far from secure, he’s committed to staking his claim here, despite the uncertainty that his business could face on the other end of this critical juncture in the country’s history. Backstage, he made his political feelings quite clear with a shirt that read, quite simply: “Fuck Boris.”Similarly, he’s taken a strong stance in the shifting sands of the fashion system, announcing at today’s show that he will no longer be working on a conventional schedule. Moving forward, his collections will be numbered, not tethered to traditional seasons. It’s a bold move on his part, but one that makes sense for several reasons. Beyond aligning with his sustainable production values, it affords him the time and space to amplify the specialness of his one-of-a-kind clothes and better serve the women who have supported him from the beginning.
16 September 2019
The agonies of Brexit are very real to the London fashion community. Several British friends of mine have set about proving their Irish heritage, so as to be eligible for a European passport, which will allow them to continue traveling and working in Europe unimpeded after March 30. Richard Malone, an Irish designer in London (and sustainability practitioner) has the opposite problem—he wants to continue to be “allowed” to stay, run his business, and employ people in the U.K. He’s one of the British fashion community’s many hundreds of European passport holders who must now apply for “settled status”—an arduous bureaucratic process which demands proof of continuous income tax and travel in and out of the U.K.One would usually write “but I digress” after a review opener like that, but with Malone, Brexit anxiety was central to the setup of his show. Inevitably, European nationals in Britain are looking over their shoulders to consider what’s on offer back home, should they need or be forced to return (and Dublin is currently booming as companies like Google locate there, rather than the U.K.). Malone found himself looking back with nostalgia to simpler times of village street parties when mothers opened their doors to all comers and people of all generations gathered in “badly lit community centers—you know, the sort of thing you really hate as a teenager, but now think is fantastic,” he laughed.In his mind, the characters on his runway had dressed up to take part in the community party—the tonal “tea towel” wraps tucked into belts were his salute to the ladies who join in to run things. It should be noted, however, that the women who buy Malone’s clothes are ladies who also run things, like art foundations and galleries. His charm, ethical practices, and his ingenious ability to cut—in spiral techniques, with ethically sourced fabrics and fair pay—have made him what amounts to a wardrobe-realizer (sounds less pretentious than “couturier”) for a group of cool, socially aware women. He thanked “all of my empowering and inspiring customers” in his program notes.What will they be ordering from him this season? Perhaps more of his signature flared-pant suits (this season with a touch of punk bondage strapping at the knee). Possibly one of the prints he’s done on recycled organic cotton jersey, or a slinky contoured dress, which, his notes assure them, “is made from precisely one metre of woven fabric.
” Most likely of all though, in these times when people need cheering up? The striped “fun fur” red, white, and blue stoles and the giant coat that looks like Certs. Lovers of Malone, and his effervescently positive character and leadership, will doubtless be thrilled to boast, as he did: “They’re made from recycled dog beds!”
20 February 2019
Bright and early at London Fashion Week, a surprise from Richard Malone. What is that tip-top traditional haute couture duchesse satin doing on the runway occupied by this working-class firebrand of fashion activism? He luxed it up, he sexed it up, but whoa . . . wait a minute. To recap: Malone, the Irish pro-feminist designer, is also a sustainability spokes-youth, and bringing all that duchesse satin onto the stage immediately opens him up to all kinds of interrogation on sourcing and purpose—subjects that are rarely broached even in whispers in front of the creative directors of mega-brands. But there he was. On point with his reasons. Non-ecologically-damaging material doesn’t have to look like hopsack. The silk, he said, is by the venerable Italian manufacturer Taroni, which he called “the most sustainable company in the world.” It has made fabric for Cristóbal Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, and numberless others in couture, right up to Prada nowadays. “They’ve been weavers for a very, very long time. They use little water, and their colors are acid-free,” Malone explained.Along with his fragmented, athletic-hybrid couture shapes—ballooning shoulders, drawstrings, utility pockets—there were body T-shirts and fabrics that looked suspiciously like synthetics. They’re all “clean,” too, he vouched. The stretch and ripstop materials are in Econyl, the fabric made from recycled nylon, which keeps the nasty stuff on permanent rotation in new garment forms, and thus out of landfills and the oceans.Malone passed that exam, then. As for the style of it all? He talked about being spontaneously influenced by the this and the that he collects in his notebooks—the latticed fringes inspired by fake eyelash boxes, a print of a face lifted from a snap he took in the street. His fit-and-flare midi shapes were sexier, drapier, and slinkier—catnip to the private clients with whom he’s developed relationships. Women in the art world have been calling on him over the past few seasons. This isn’t exactly a couture business as the world used to recognize it. But Malone’s market is another indicator of how much this new generation is (excuse the cliché) changing all the conversations about who buys and why.
14 September 2018
Was there ever a time when sustainable fashion was in its own special lane for ecologically worthy but slightly meh clothes? When dressing eco-consciously equated with garments the color and texture of wholemeal wheat? Well, look at the colorful, cheerfully chic energy of Richard Malone’s collection and know there’s a change coming: a new generation that does its ethics by showing exciting fashion—almost forgetting to speak about the good practices by which it abides. Since all the preaching in the world never sold clothes to a woman on a mission to look good, Malone’s startlingly refreshing show put London Fashion Week’s best foot forward at 9 a.m. on the first morning. For circle-cut jackets, sweeping coats, swishy knit dresses, and flares by the young Irish designer from Wexford, step this way!There was a lot to like. Malone confidently hit the mark of age-spanning appeal (20s to infinity), which is a real relief for women in these days of impending Philo deprivation. Not to say he’s one of fashion’s slavish legion of Phoebe-alikes—Malone’s ability to mix checks and stripes while owning a vivid palette is becoming an identifiable signature, with a touch, as he put it, “of the willfully unrefined.” Those who bothered to read through his highly amusing kissed-the–Blarney Stone press release would find out why: He was brought up as a boy to respect what women are like. Amid his narrative about the market stalls and working-class communities of his youth is a socially observed joke about the strength of women and “young men who are at once fiercely protective, and deeply terrified of their mothers.” (Hence the conceptual headscarves.) His whole family had come over from Ireland for the occasion, with Nellie Malone, Richard’s grandmother—an inspiration with her crocheting—as the guest of honor.Only by the fourth paragraph did Malone get around to stating that “sustainability is a given for the brand.” It has been, in fact, since he went to India and found a community of female weavers from whom to buy fabric for his Central Saint Martins BA graduation collection. He’s been commissioning the collective in Tamil Nadu for years. They’re responsible for the strong, nonpolluting colors he loves, and techniques which also involve low water consumption.
With his regular use of recycled viscose and the quite brilliant use of fringed red and blue checks (with a bag to match, handwoven from 100 percent recycled plastic), this is all clearly so normal to Malone that he barely thinks to shout about it. Instead, it’s the design that does it for him. In an industry that is agonizing over the ethics of overproduction and the content and meaning of fashion—isn’t that the way priorities should be?
16 February 2018
The Irish fashion contingent in London—JW Anderson and Simone Rocha—have officially been joined by a third talented compatriot, young Richard Malone, who hails from County Wexford in the Irish Republic. Without making sweeping generalizations about national traits, what these individuals have in common is that incredibly rare knack of being uplifting-ly creative, while having a pragmatic consideration for women who might want to wear their clothes. “Commercial” and “wearable” are sneer words too often used among cognoscenti, but what if they also come from designers who can be classed as imaginative and avant-garde?True, with his bold, cheerful colors and liking for fluted shapes, Malone is not an absolute beginner. He limbered up for a couple of seasons with Fashion East, and then last season with a small New Gen presentation—actually a delightful performance with dancers—but today he faced a big test: His first walking show kicked off London Fashion Week.He didn’t disappoint. Never mind where his inspiration came from for a minute. Simply, the combined clarity of the colors (mostly blues), terrific barbershop-stripe cutaway jersey stocking boots (by new shoe designer Roker), and the mix of silhouettes (long skirts, asymmetrical bras, flares, shorts, short dresses) clinched it as a collection that lots of women—shape and age regardless—will want to wear. It also looks strong in pictures. Probably that’s as good a definition of what we call fashion today. Even more so, because it comes from someone who belongs to the new ethical, resourceful generation who make a lot out of little, and whose casting naturally reflects the diversity of London life.After the show, Malone chatted about his inclusive point of view. “I was thinking about people in pubs. Where I come from, you’re in the pub when you’re, like, 14, and I suppose that’s where I watched all sorts of people socializing, this mix of women of all ages.” There was an annual opera festival, too, visitors from all over the world to feed his eyes on. “It was the first time I’d seen people in formal suits and dresses standing next to others in garish casual clothes. With everyone getting along, as they do. I suppose all that came out, subconsciously. Because I don’t believe in any boundaries. I like things [that] draw people together.”The waste involved in the production of clothes is something that seriously bothers this generation of designers and consumers.
Richard Malone does not wear his conscience on his sleeve—or on a T-shirt—but he sources his vivid textile art patterns in collaboration with a collective of women weavers in Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. They use natural dyes and processes that require minimal energy and water. This is what eco fashion looks like today: pretty damn good.
15 September 2017