Fashion Vintage clothes in Kilkenny
Madeleine Carroll and Grace Dalton are Madgrá Vintage, a new online shop for all things vintage clothing. Both are graphic designers from Kilkenny with a flair for pre-loved clothing and taking a more sustainable approach to their fashion picks. Here, Madeleine details the history behind their venture and how it came about during Covid
“We were both children of the ’80s, when there was no Penneys or H&M in Ireland. e idea of mass produced cheap clothes wasn’t really an option for us. We wore hand-medowns from sisters or cousins, our mothers made us clothes and we were happy with them. Clothes had a longer lifespan and went down through the generations.
They weren’t made to be thrown out a er a few wears. e idea wouldn’t even be entertained! You ripped your tights, they were darned; your elbows wore away, you put a patch on them; the same if you had a random hole in your clothes, they would just be repaired. I still remember buying my rst Penneys out t down in Carlow, a bicycle shorts and t-shirt set and being amazed! Sure, cheaper mass-produced fashion has given an a ordability to a large majority of the population, but it also devalued them in our eyes too. Fashion changes so quickly, social media pictures wearing an out t on a night out makes them unwearable in other’s eyes. We are just consuming clothes at an alarming rate and it’s having a catastrophic e ect on the environment. Land lls ll with discarded clothes, rivers run in toxic dyes and millions of litres of water are used to produce t-shirts.
“We are changing our ways and sustainability is on everyone’s lips. Large companies purport to have changed their ways, but do a little investigating and you’ll see the changes are minimal. ey still use manufacturing methods that are damaging to the environment and underpay their workers and put them at risk in unsafe buildings.
This is known as ‘green washing’ using misleading or exaggerated advertising to create an appearance of being more responsible.
“When we decided to start selling vintage clothes, we wanted to see them get a second life. I’ve always worn vintage clothes from a young age, even if sometimes it was dress up. I remember myself and my three sisters wearing a jumper of my father’s one a er the other through our teenage years, until my mother eventually threw it out! I still have some of both my parents’ clothes and I love getting to wear them. My mother ran a swap shop when I was in primary school and I remember being excited to look through all the clothes. She would send out clothes to a lady in her home village who would give them to people who couldn’t a ord them. I think this is where some people associated charity or vintage clothes with being poor. I like to think of vintage or pre-loved clothes as having a back story. Who wore that dress? What occasion was it? A rst date, a wedding or a job interview? e stories are endless, and I don’t think their story should end up in a land ll.
“Madgrá Vintage curate women’s vintage clothes from the ’50s to ’90s. We pick what we would wear ourselves(some clothes never made it past our hands!). Grace and I have di erent tastes and that is re ected in the styles we stock. I’m a real’ 70s fan while Grace prefers the ’80s. We have turned our hobby into a business over the last year, taking the decision at the end of March to set up a website. It took us a good few months to get it going and we’re really proud of it. Every time we get a lovely post back from one of our customers it gives us an enormous sense of pride. We are delighted to get back to markets now that the country is opening up a bit more and will take part in three in our county over the next few weekends. Of course, we are apprehensive with Covid but we are hoping that we can welcome new and old customers to have a ri e through our pieces.”
For more information madgravintage.com