This London Fashion Week feels like a milestone moment for Richard Malone, who is showing his spring/summer 2022 show at the iconic Victoria & Albert Museum, while also launching a new collaboration with Mulberry. “I didn’t even think you could do a show in that part of the V&A,” the Irish designer tells Vogue, a week prior to the show. “It feels very dramatic.”
Malone’s rise through the ranks of the fashion industry – which has seen him win the prestigious Woolmark Prize in 2020 and be nominated for the LVMH Prize in 2019 – has been a unique one, namely because he still operates on a predominantly made-to-order basis, and strictly limits the amount he sells to retailers. His materials, meanwhile, are either recycled or sustainably sourced from mills across the UK and Ireland.
“We don’t really do seasonal collections, so they’re always just titled at the date that they’re completed,” Malone explains. “For the last few seasons, and this season as well, we’ve shown clothes that were already sold, which never happens in [the industry]. It’s a very different way of making fashion; it’s not inventing a character or a consumer because I know them all.”
The designer’s pioneering approach has not only helped him reduce waste and establish genuine connections with his clients – who he describes as being from “a lot of very different backgrounds” – but also build strong relationships with his suppliers. “We’ve never worked with factories around the world in Portugal, Spain or Italy,” Malone says. “It’s really quite localised, so we can have a direct relationship with the tailor in Finsbury Park, with the knitter in Peckham; it’s quite easy for us.”
The upsides of his business model have become even more evident during the pandemic, when a lot of designers faced swathes of cancellations from retailers as stores shuttered around the world. “We were lucky because we don’t really wholesale,” Malone continues. “Because it’s quite small scale, you could make it quite adaptable. The nature of what I do [means] you have to be adaptable.”
In fact, the early part of the pandemic saw the designer working on a show at e.1027 – a villa created by Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray – in France. Malone has also just opened an exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland, as well as featuring in an exhibition on Ireland’s LGBTQIA+ diaspora at the EPIC museum, showing the wide-ranging nature of his work. “We’ve also got stuff in the permanent collection of the MoMA [Museum Of Modern Art in New York],” the designer adds. “That doesn’t really happen to young designers.”
Although he admits that his approach may be considered a risky one, there’s no doubt that the risk is paying off. “I think [we have] to be very open to other forms of judgement or success,” Malone concludes. “I’m just rolling [with it] because I started really with nothing; it’s not about money for me – it never has been.”
