FEATURE : ROBYN LYNCH’S TAKE ON RAPHA
Like many other aspiring artists, when she was young, Dublin-born designer Robyn Lynch would go to the Tate and other galleries when she visited London in a quest to feed her creative drive. She would take in the Matisses and Picassos and would travel home to her mates and share with them what she had seen the best she can. But this was all in vain. If anything, these trips only reinforced the love she has for her native Ireland. “It’s way more personal and effortless to talk about your own roots, and there’s just so much warmth and humour in doing so,” says Robyn.
When she eventually moved abroad to study menswear at Westminster, the designer quickly figured out one thing — if she was to bring something to the runway, it would have to be true to herself and embrace the folkways of the Irish culture. The way that one’s quaint, long-established customs can sometimes be seen as odd, and yet somehow contagious to others, it got to the point where her foreign flatmate would go on praying to St. Anthony (the patron saint of lost objects) anytime they’d lost their laptop.
Fast forward to today, and Robyn’s known for stringing together things that normally wouldn’t appear next to one another, the old and the new for instance. Although she now sources most of her synthetic textiles from a fabric mill called Lemar in Portugal, in the early days of her design career she would take charity shops finds, chop them, and then reconstruct the cut off pieces with wool jumpers she’s getting from a local family-owned business into new clothes with a cosy, yet technical and modern twist. Her graduate collection featured, in a moment of pride for her beloved homeland, a series of matching monochromatic outfits in either green, white or orange. The fits consisted of jackets, blazers, sweaters, shirts, joggers and shorts, and were mostly made of classic Aran knits and sportswear fabrics.
As means of promotion, she’s made a visual piece which, for lack of better terms, gathers a compilation of cheeky news clips from RTÉ (the Irish equivalent to BBC) that were broadcast in the 80s and 90s. From flute and violin jams at the pub to youngsters in chunky knit jumpers taking hits of their asthma pumps and football players in very short shorts, it’s the epitome of Irish culture pre-noughties.
On top of her MA collection, she’s steadily presented a runway show at London Fashion Week for about two or three years now (except of course in times of global pandemic, during which she showcased the SS21 line online). Through that time, she’s been a Fashion East alumni. Being taken under the wing of stylist Ben Schofield, MUA Terry Barber, writer Charlie Porter, and the whole team behind her that helped with the castings, the public relations, etc., etc. — has been, she admits, “such a booster.”
Though she admittedly was on a roll since uni, the minute she “graduated” from Fashion East and was left to fend for herself, the first lockdown hit. Whereas she would normally have been busy prepping for the following fashion week and meetings with the buyers, all these were now canceled. Even Lemar couldn’t keep business going (and, to this day, still can’t.) In those daunting circumstances, the newly independent designer changed tack.
In hopes to keep cash flowing, she started to look at every other avenue available to still put out some sort of a collection. But then, one of the creative directors of Rapha and, funnily enough, fellow Irish native, Ger Tierner, happened to repost one of her looks on Instagram. Seeing this, Robyn took a shot and figured, why not reach out? “I just DMed her to ask if there’d be a possibility for me to see the company’s archives for myself,” says the designer. “Next thing you know, she facetimed me from the headquarters so that we could go over what they had left from the last seasons. Usually the surplus would have gone to a sample sale, but they’ve kindly let me have it.”
What came out of this donation is a capsule of twelve pieces that was digitally shown at the London Fashion Week Men’s 2020. The colour palette is a tad out of Robyn’s usual monochrome, tonal style, and is instead contrastingly neutral and bold; the design outcome, though, carries a certain sense of deja vu. As per usual, it mingles the synthetic and the natural— whether it comes in the form of high-tech short shorts (some of which have bike tights underneath), paneled polos or, of course, reconstructed wool jumpers.
But what’s more striking is to see the designer’s take on cycling clothing and how it isn’t entirely alien to her previous work. “Rapha’s been a big inspiration to me and that, even before considering working with them,” she says. “There’s so much thought put into their aesthetic. Everything has a purpose, from the placement of pockets and taped seams to the finishing. Putting aside the knits I work with, I’ve always looked up to the stuff they do for guidance on the functionality of sportswear.”
To her surprise, Robyn was then approached by the buying team at Browns, who wondered whether she’d be up to push the collection further and do an exclusive for them, which she accepted forthwith. “I said yes right away,” she says. “I didn’t even get to tell Ger at Rapha about it, but yet again she’s been supportive enough to let me have anything I needed.”
The outcome of this collab? Not only did it tempt the designer to do other similar projects and repurpose deadstock from other brands (and to one day get to see Rapha’s physical archive for herself, in person), it also influenced her designs. For SS21, Robyn brought cycling jerseys, seamless tops and, overall, pieces with more defined lines and fitted forms to her signature style of sporty casualwear. She’s made more short shorts, khaki pants and, to expand her range, included womenswear for the first time, with short as well as long skirts.
And, as a nod to sports sponsorship and a way to say thank you, she’s printed some pieces with the logos of her father’s grocer shop, Pearl Deli, and the other Dublin-based businesses who supported her throughout her degree and who still support her to this day, whether that be by lending her a sewing machine or printing her linesheets and lookbooks. “To me, they’re just like sponsors,” says Robyn.
It would be simplistic to say the lockdown’s been good to the designer but, in a way, it seems to have been a blessing in disguise. “If the shops didn’t cancel their orders, if the fashion week did happen as planned, I would never have reached out to Rapha. If anything, it gave me the confidence to do my own thing,” she says.