As comment sections go, “Wow, I love and I also want to cuddle her like a soft toy”, must rank among the stranger – and yet, perhaps, most benign – responses ever left beneath an image of a woman on the red carpet. It appeared under a photo of Nicola Coughlan, taken shortly after she took her bow on press night at the National Theatre in The Playboy of the Western World – in which she plays a barmaid swept off her feet by a man claiming to have murdered his father with a farming implement in the west of Ireland – wearing a Colin Burke dress, hand-wrought from Donegal tweed yarns and traditional Aran stitchwork.
In essence, it was a big, hip-flaring sweater – the final boss of Christmas jumpers, if you will – which Coughlan’s stylist, Aimée Croysdill, paired with coordinating cream-coloured tights from Heist Studios and pointed-toe Jimmy Choo Ixia 95 patent-leather pumps. “All of Nicola’s costumes are made using traditional Irish techniques and fabrics,” Croysdill noted on the same post. “So we wanted to honour the play by doing the same for this look.” She’s not alone, here: in the wake of Magherafelt-native Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior – where the house’s most recognisable icon, the Bar jacket, appeared in sparkly green Donegal tweed – Irish craftsmanship seems to be finding itself newly (and belatedly) revered in the fashion world.
Which is, of course, not to discount Simone Rocha, Róisín Pierce, Michael Stewart’s Standing Ground, or Sean McGirr’s McQueen, designers whose work has long been grounded in Irish craft. But it does feel symptomatic of something larger going on at the moment: the so-called “Green Wave”, a sudden, collective fixation on Cool Eire, which has seen writers such as Sally Rooney and Paul Lynch, actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and musicians Fontaines DC, CMAT and Kneecap – not to mention Guinness, spice bags, chicken fillet rolls – take on real currency far beyond the shores of the Wild Atlantic Way. It stands to reason that fashion, too, should finally be catching up.
