Michéal McInerney
Fashion Design BA
National College of Art and Design Dublin
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Party/Eveningwear / Atelier - Pattern Cutting
My location: Dublin, Ireland
Michéal McInerney
First Name: Michéal
Last Name: McInerney
University / College: National College of Art and Design Dublin
Course / Program: Fashion Design BA
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Party/Eveningwear / Atelier - Pattern Cutting
My Location: Dublin, Ireland
About
My name is Michéal Mc Inerney, and I’m a 22-year-old fashion designer from Ballyherragh, West Clare, Ireland. My work is grounded in my relationship with the land, culture, and native flora of my home. Ballyherragh, located just metres from the Cliffs of Moher, is a place of gothic beauty and brutal natural force. It’s also steeped in rural conservatism and Catholic tradition, which creates a tension that has profoundly shaped my creative perspective. I often explore this duality in my work, the feeling of otherness within one's home, contrasted with a deep reverence for its stark and haunting landscape.My graduate collection, Hag’s Head, was inspired by a local legend and developed through illustration and atmospheric research. I used these references to guide the collection’s mood, combining narrative with my love for unconventional cutting, asymmetry, and sculptural construction. I’m particularly passionate about evening wear and take strong influence from designers like Madame Grès and Cristóbal Balenciaga. These references inform my use of structured pleating, inventive tailoring, and both internal and external corsetry to create silhouette and hold. I’m especially drawn to the technical side of fashion, toiling and experimentation, which is why I plan to pursue a career in pattern cutting. I find immense satisfaction in shaping garments through process and precision. In the long term, my ambition is to become a full-time pattern cutter.
Hag’s Head is an evening wear collection that reflects where I grew up, the Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, and how the landscape, atmosphere, culture and flora have influenced my aesthetic. It tells the legend of Hag’s Head, the most westerly point of the cliffs, of a witch who fell in love with the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, her love ultimately leading to her demise, whereupon her body transformed the cliff face of Hag’s Head, as seen on the title page. The collection is an imagined embodiment of the area, drawing from the contradictory traits that define the landscape and people, the brutal, the conservative and the gothic, paired with the beauty, the kinship, and the ethereal. The collection features deformed tailoring and hyper-textured evening wear that both defines and rejects the body housed within. An all black palette emphasises the mood and silhouettes of the pieces. The use of veils is both a reference to the Irish mythological figure of The Cailleach and a means to seperate the self from the Body. On a personal level the collection captures what it feels like to be from somewhere but never belonging to it. a manifestation of my feelings for the place I am from, it is the love for my home I have acquired in adulthood tempered with the hate I felt for it as an adolescent.
Competitions
