This site is dedicated to celebrating Ireland’s architectural heritage, but occasionally other aspects and eras of one’s life intrude: in this specific instance a time when Ireland’s fashion history was of absorbing interest. Curated by your correspondent, Ireland’s Fashion Radicals is an exhibition that explores how this country came to develop a thriving fashion industry during the 1950s and ‘60s. The earlier decade is regarded as being perhaps the worst in post-Independence Ireland yet this was the moment – when both emigration and unemployment were rampant – that a group of designers, the great majority of them women, initiated successful businesses in the field of fashion. In so doing, they also proposed a new image of Ireland as a centre of design excellence, one that was eagerly embraced and promoted overseas so that soon fashion editors and buyers flocked to Dublin as much as they did Paris or London. These pioneers deserve to be celebrated, and the Irish Aesthete is delighted to salute Ireland’s Fashion Radicals.

Ireland’s Fashion Radicals runs at the Little Museum of Dublin, 15 St Stephen’s Green until March 18th next. For those in search of architectural stimulation, the building dates from the second half of the 1770s when built for Gustavus Hume.