“Six Dresses, Six Strangers’ Wardrobes, and Not One Phone Call,” Says Mirela Sund
Saoirse Quill dressed five women for a Dublin winter party in clothes pulled from private wardrobes, and told no one. Mirela Sund admires the idea and prosecutes the silence.
The first dress comes out of a hatchback on Capel Street at 8:40, still in its dry-cleaner's bag, with a paper tag pinned to the shoulder. The tag says Maeve. Nobody on the pavement knows a Maeve.
This is the Saoirse Quill shoot for the Marrow Rooms winter party. Five women, five dresses, every one lifted from a private Dublin wardrobe: a cousin's, a landlady's, a retired ferry purser's. There is drizzle on the rail. Good drizzle, honestly. It makes the velvet look sorry for itself.
I will say this plainly, because it will not happen often. The idea is good. A green crepe with a hem let down twice has a life. It beats another showroom loan sent back with the tags tucked in.
Then came the press note, which called the clothes archive. Archive is a word for a room with humidity control and a woman in cotton gloves. This was a spare room in Phibsborough with a hoover in it. Quill had a brave idea and then chose a timid word to explain it.
It gets worse. The women who wore the dresses were told vintage. The women who lent them were told it was a small project. Neither group was told about the other. That is not styling, that is a switchboard.
The best thing on the rail was a navy silk with a cigarette burn at the left cuff. Someone had hidden the burn under a bracelet. Hiding the burn and hiding the owner come from the same instinct, and an instinct this timid should be fed and put to bed early.
I do not care that nobody was harmed. The dresses went home pressed. But a dress with a stranger's name in the lining is a story, and the credits threw the story in a skip. It is a small fraud, and the worst kind, the kind that makes the work worse. One card beside the navy silk reading Maeve, Rathmines, 1994, the burn is hers, and it would have been the best dress in the city.
Instead it was a loan with a press office.
Call the owners. They will say yes. These are women who kept a dress for thirty years. They can keep a secret for a weekend, but they would rather be thanked.
Maeve, if you are reading this, your dress went to the party. It had a better night than the credits suggest.
