Fashion shoot
A last passionate fling with nature
The 1980s were the last decade in which every woman in Ireland was united with her sisters in her sartorial pleasures.
Fashion was still somewhat formal, and your wool coat was your single biggest and most favourite purchase of the year, if not several years. Buying it involved an entourage — mothers, fathers, sisters, best friends — before you took the plunge and spent So Much Money.
But sure, it’ll last you for years, was the perennial excuse for losing your head and spending all your dosh. Then there were fabulous knits and separates, hats and gloves...Yes, indeed, winter style was a season people knew how to enjoy really well.
Comfortable as they are, jeans and puffer jackets just don’t cut the same dash. This is something international designers, as evidenced by their catwalks, have discovered for themselves this season.
Fashion stylist Sarah Rickard-Lantry is a diehard when it comes to loving fashion’s dramatic high notes. As our last hurrah to 2017, Sarah combined all her favourite themes of this season, many of which take their cue from the 1980s, and brought them all together to create an evocative, drama-laden shoot.
“I get a flutter walking through stores in late autumn, early winter, looking at the arrival of fabulous coats and winter boots. I can take or leave summer, but I adore winter,” says Sarah. “Winter is so much about layers and colour and texture. It is about what you see in nature brought into clothing. It is a visual feast.
“It is a time when boutiques, with their individuality of buying, really shine through.”
For our shoot today, Sarah was inspired by a photograph taken in Luggala, Co Wicklow by photographer Ethan Hart, which he posted on Instagram. That, and the fact that Vikings is shot in Wicklow and
Game of Thrones in the North, gave Sarah an idea. “Sleeves are an important part of the costumes in those dramas and that is going on in fashion, too,” Sarah elaborates. “There is also a strong warrior trend, especially with all the use of furs, and shearlings layered up like armour. The knit is a key piece; wearing it over a beautiful dress, then adding — again almost armour-like in feel — studded boots. More is definitely more; not as they do in it in Gucci this season, but in a meaningful way,” she says.
“Where your clothes are doing you a service, such as keeping you warm, as well as being beautiful.”