Roisin Cummins, design process

Roisin’s graduate collection was based upon crossing the ideals of fetish and femininity, whilst looking through the eyes of style icon Daphne Guinness. Her collection found her looking into over enhancing parts of the female figure through highlighting shapes from traditional metal body armour and drag padding/ shaping. This allowed her to create a protective shell encasing the female figure.

This Process gave Roisin the opportunity for her garments to give an empowered and assertive feel, whilst having a fetishistic ambience about them. It was incredibly important to Roisin, as women not only in fetish/sex industry but worldwide can be heavily seen as submissive, degraded and seen as just a toy for the male perspective. Most women have some form of submission in their lives whether that be through restrictive clothing such as Spanx, corsets, figure-hugging garments or your typical shapewear. Women submit to beauty standards that are already chosen for them from hair cuts, colours, spray tans, beauty regimes, makeup, waxing to the extremes of body enhancements and surgeries. Some submit in everyday life from unequal pay in comparison to men, having the role of mother and housewife. Of course some of these things women enjoy but there’s many out there who don’t but are too afraid or lost to know exactly how to stand up and be dominant in their own life. Roisin wanted her collection to give women the opportunity and possibility to take some form of power back to their control while being the change for others.

Whilst creating power, sexiness, femininity and abundance of confidence. For the women out there that want to be more than a sexual and aesthetically pleasing object or seen as the weaker sex. Her collection seen me develop a few signature aesthetics such as metal lacing. Instead of simply sewing basic seams she chose to install eyelets and lace them up to give the element of restrictive corsetry but having control of that. It also plays with the idea of easily being able to change sizing whether that be up or down without ruining the silhouette or having to purchase a new garment. Secondly, she developed the idea of enhancing and inflating body parts from hyperextension of the hips and the elbows from different types of moulding and draping.