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Staged as part of the Dublin Fashion Festival, The Young Designer of the Year Awards act as an important platform for talented fashion students to have their work recognised by Dublin’s network of fashion enthusiasts and industry heavyweights. This year’s show presented the work of twelve young designers, only a small selection of the submissions received from colleges across the country.

The neoclassical pillars of the Bank of Ireland served as a powerful backdrop to the garments on show, which weaved Ireland’s design history with elements of subjective modernity. A perfect example of this was the work of Katie Donohoe who presented a crop top and culottes, an undeniably modern silhouette, in a traditional cream shade. A mixture of leather straps draped around the model’s shoulders and jagged Perspex shapes sewn onto the bottoms, subtly played with textures while allowing the design to remain wearable. It was this blend of commercial viability and avant-garde design that ensured Donoghoe walked home with the night’s coveted award.

The young designer’s work was followed by a longer, and somewhat diversionary, presentation of garments by established Irish designers. This was an interesting aspect of the night as it advertised to the young designers a potential future in this country. Although this section of the show’s primary aim was to pull consumers into the shops, names such as J.W. Anderson and Orla Kiely constructed a history of Irish fashion design, which these young students aspire to add to.

The ceremony concluded with the announcement of the inaugural Young Photographer of the Year. Lisa Griffin was an obvious choice for the award with her romantic, Tim Walker-esque images. Both the photographers and the designers celebrated on the night were clearly chosen for their ability to represent Ireland’s creative idiosyncrasies, in the context of a global fashion community, where one must counter the expected in order to capitalise.