The MODEL MOTHER
Knitwear designer Faye Dinsmore talks to Liadan Hynes about modelling, motherhood, and about how Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave managed to win her heart
FOR a woman long acknowledged as one of Ireland’s most successful models, Faye Dinsmore is equivocal about modelling. “Never enthralled” by the job, the origins of her hugely successful career were, she says, with a smile and a shrug, pretty cliched.
A 20-year-old student in Trinity at the time, NCAD was holding its annual fashion show and had an open call. “One of my friends was going, and said ‘oh, will you go with me, I’m really nervous’. And that’s how I got it.” Work came thick and fast. “I was the youngest girl; me and Lynn Kelly. Where now you can go into a Dublin agency and find young teens. That’s ridiculous.” She is glad she began modelling before Instagram, she says. “People are more aware of it now as a career. Or not a career, a lifestyle,” she says dismissively.
“I couldn’t tell anyone I modelled for so long. It’s just embarrassing. ‘What’s your job?’ ‘Well, most days I carry a book of pictures of myself around and show them to people and hope they might give me a job’. OK, it is a skill; you have to know what to do in front of a camera. But you’re not saving lives.”
Now modelling for 10 years, between Dublin, London, New York and Paris, something about Faye seems hardy enough to have survived that sometimes brutal-on-the self-esteem world.
Taking a year out from her studies in Ancient Greek and Roman, and French, she lived in Paris for a year, working full-time as a model. “You’d have 15 castings a day. If you sat down and thought of it, you’d think ‘oh I went to 40 or so castings this week and booked two jobs’.”
Several things kept her slightly above that bruising competitive world. “I had very red hair at the time, so I knew that my competition was only the other red-haired girls. Most models in Paris at that time were tall, blonde, thin Eastern European girls. And I didn’t live in the model house. I lived with my friends who were on Erasmus so I wasn’t caught up. Of course, I went to the model parties, all those free dinners and everything you can go to for a little while, but then it just gets so boring.”
The pressure to lose weight is systemic, she says, but something she was, luckily, unfazed by. “My agencies were always telling me to lose weight. Constantly. That’s just a general rule I think agencies have towards their models; to tell you to lose weight. I’m naturally really slim anyway, so it’s never been a problem. I remember knowing; I don’t need to. I’d tell my friends, and they’d be like ‘those people are crazy’, and we’d just have a laugh about it. So I wasn’t completely in that world, believing it.”
“And plus,” she adds with a grin, “there’s Photoshop. If the client is not happy, they can just Photoshop it. It really doesn’t matter that much what you look like in real life. I used to be so embarrassed turning up at jobs where they’d only seen pictures of my work. You’d be like, ‘ugh, sorry it’s me’, or they’d ask ‘are you the make-up artist?’”
It was modelling, though, which led to her second career, as a knitwear designer. Faye is one of the designers featuring in this year’s CREATE, Brown Thomas Dublin’s annual celebration of Irish design. It was on shoots abroad that she began to notice that the traditional Aran fisherman sweater is a huge, ongoing, trend. “I remember doing a shoot for a top designer and modelling the big cream Aran sweater. I think it was €800, and the label was made in Cambodia. And I thought ‘surely the Aran sweater, made in Ireland, that should be the creme de la creme’. Some people didn’t even know that that particular style of sweater was Irish. Because it is so copied. I do find in Ireland there isn’t a huge push for our fashion and textiles industry in the same way that you’d find in Scotland or France.”
She began looking into setting up a company herself, sourcing knitters in her native Donegal. At her busiest
‘It’s very different rationalising being a model and having feminist values’
times, she now employs up to 20 women, mostly older women, some of whom use stitches now known to only a few. Faye’s work is honouring traditional craft beyond the tourist market, but as high fashion pieces.
Faye herself grew up on a farm in Donegal. “I remember my brothers would shear the sheep and the wool would go to the local factory where it would be treated. I knew women who knit locally. My mother, my aunts. Not on a commercial level but at home.” It is this same factory Faye now uses for her business.
Hers is a large family; 14 siblings in total. “I’m lucky number 13,” she smiles. Currently the age range is 27 to 52. Faye, herself, is 30. All 14 never lived in the family home at one time. “My eldest sister was married with kids before I was born. And people went to boarding school. When you come from a big family, they’re always there. You don’t feel like you have to work at your relationships as much. You’re not focusing on one person. Everyone just gets on fine.” Faye herself went to boarding school at 12, a small Donegal school, Monday to Friday, and loved it.
“It was mixed,” she explains. “Which I think makes for a much better environment. My husband went to an all-boys boarding school. And his friends, seriously, when it comes to women, they’re just like other creatures.”
Her husband is, of course, Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit founder. They were introduced at a party by publisher Trevor White. “I was there with a friend,” Faye recalls. “Trevor came over and he probably asked my name, what I did, checked my credentials, something like that,” she smiles wryly. “He said ‘I’m here with my friend, he’s a bit nervous in social situations, would you mind if I left you to chat to him for a while?’ ”
And that was Paddy, she says. “He asked me for my number, I didn’t give it to him. He said he’d find me on Facebook. I’d only got a Facebook account like a month before. I didn’t have a laptop, didn’t have a smartphone.” This was in 2008.
Weeks afterwards, looking at Facebook on a friend’s laptop, she noticed an old message from Paddy she had missed. “Meet me on Sunday at Front Square at 11.15,” she solemnly intones before breaking into a smile. “I was like ‘who is that guy?’ But somehow he tracked me down.”
Their first date was in Bewley’s on Grafton Street. Did she know early on that Paddy was the one? “Eh, no,” she says. “Even when we got engaged… I mean, we were engaged for five years. I was completely surprised when he asked. And I’m so lucky now, that that is how it happened. Rather than being 10 years going out and being like, nudge nudge.”
They got married two years ago. “I popped into town and picked up a Self Portrait dress in Brown Thomas. It was in a registry office, just us and two friends, coffee and lunch with our housemates afterwards. I didn’t want a big wedding and everyone looking at me. Or to have to organise the 70 million things.”
She and Paddy seem like they might be quite shy; extroverted introverts capable of turning it on when required but not relishing the spotlight. “Even though our work seems very public at times,” Faye reflects. “For example, on shoots I’m not shy at all. But when it comes to real-life photos, say for the shoot we’ll do after this,” she shakes her head. “It’s very different when it’s you rather than a character.”
Faye was pregnant with their son Cloud, now one, when they got married. Having all those older siblings and the nieces and nephews was absolutely no preparation whatsoever for motherhood, she says ruefully.
“I’d never changed a nappy. I didn’t have any interest in children. In college, me and my friends would meet up, share articles from different feminist magazines, drink gin, talk about how men were s**t and about the roles women were expected to assume. And we kind of rallied against that in lots of ways. And were like ‘we’re going to have a career. Aaagh to kids’. As if it was unfeminist, admitting you had maternal instincts. And now I realise that’s an attitude that was great at the time, but so naive.
“I know it’s funny that I would include myself in that,” she says, “when all my friends were doing real jobs and I was literally selling myself for money. It’s very different rationalising being a model and having strong feminist values. So I never went out of my way to learn about kids. And then it’s such a shock. You’re like ‘whoa, what is this?’”
The name Cloud came to Faye when she was pregnant. “Sometimes I’m like ‘what have I done to my child?’” she laughs.
A few hours after the birth, she had a massive haemorrhage. Standing up to go to the bathroom, she was flooded by blood. “It literally splashed up the curtain. It was in a pool around my feet. Then a nurse came and she was like ‘this is fine, this is normal, we’ll just walk you down to the toilet’. I remember looking back and I was trailing blood the whole way up the ward, down the corridor.”
At the time she wasn’t scared. “I remember joking ‘thank God this isn’t happening at home, my carpets would be ruined. When I got to the bathroom, just as I was about to take my underwear down, so much blood came out that it pulled them down. Eventually somebody said it was probably from where the placenta came away from the uterus wall.”
It was a horrific experience and, she says, a precursor to a challenging time. She’s angry, still, about the lack of attention given in this country to the needs of pregnant and post-partum women.
“There’s no dialogue about how maybe you need to rest for a long time. Instead of thinking about getting back into your old jeans. By around month three, by constantly breastfeeding, you end up depleted. Even when you’re pregnant, there’s this attitude of ‘you’re pregnant, what do you expect?’ ‘You just had a baby, what do you expect?’” She hopes one of the consequences of the referendum and the discussions around women’s rights will be a greater degree of attention given to the mother in maternal care, rather than an attitude of “you have a baby and if you’ve lost an arm in the labour room, doesn’t matter, the baby’s fine.”
For now, she is mostly at home with Cloud. “That was hard. I was working maybe a bit but I wasn’t totally independent. That takes adjustment. Questions arise like ‘should I be making the dinner, because my husband’s been at work all day?’ Or ‘can I ask him to hoover the sitting room?’
“I know somewhere in my head I thought that being a stay-at-home mother was the easier option than breaking through glass ceilings. Now I think any job would be easier than minding a child. Because at least if you’re working, if you’re having a meeting you can say ‘excuse me’ and go to the toilet. The amount of times you have your baby attached to you and you’re trying to go to the toilet.”
Of late, she has completed a course in gardening with Hazel Proctor and a diploma in History of Art in Trinity. “Not only had the bulk of my career been as a model, but then I was staying at home mothering. I think all models at some point think that everyone thinks they’re stupid. So those two things spurred me. I like to tell myself it’s because I go to parks and gardens and galleries with my son. We’ve still done little of those things, but that’s what I tell myself,” she laughs. Like many women, expectations around motherhood are a source of pressure. “If you haven’t gotten dressed properly and left the house, and then it’s 3pm and you think you’ve done nothing; that would make me feel bad. But you’ve been keeping a child alive.”
In light of all she has accomplished — her recent studies, running her knitwear line — with a toddler, Faye is underplaying her own achievements. She believes stay-at-home mothers are not valued in the economy as they should be. “Ideally, we should be living in an economy where a household can survive on one income. But now being a stay-at-home mother is a luxury in a way; to be able to survive on one parent’s income.”
Faye, Paddy and Cloud live in a house with six other adults, a huge help as Paddy’s work involves regular travelling. “He’ll kill me for saying this, but it’s true,” she smiles. “At one point, when Cloud was about six months, Paddy had been away for more of his life than he had been home.
“We have such a good routine when he’s away,” she laughs with a glint in her eye.