From County Clare to Haute Couture—Standing Ground’s Michael Stewart Debuts in Paris

The long-held dream of Michael Stewart will come true when his Standing Ground collection makes its entrance at the Irish embassy on the first day of Paris haute couture shows on Monday. The man from County Clare was to be found last week in his tiny atelier tucked away at the art and fashion hub 180 Strand in London. Between there, and running upstairs to supervise fittings of his monumentally sculptural work with his stylist Tallulah Harlech, the designer caught a rare moment to sit and talk.

“I’ve had it in mind for a long, long time, that showing in haute couture in Paris is what I wanted to do, but I wouldn’t speak it until I actually do it,” Stewart said. “It’s all very elaborate work, in the sense that just to make the simplicity come through, it has to have the elaborate elements to kind of get to that level.” He watched as the laces of a corseted underpinning were tightened, while a smooth sand-colored suede breastplate was maneuvered over it. Harlech and three atelier members circled, pinning on the waist of a draped skirt, weighted with Stewart’s channels of internal beading.

“It’s been a long journey and everything has been directed towards showing a couture from the very beginning,” Stewart related between fittings. The ‘beginning’ was his poetic concept rooted in Ireland’s prehistoric standing stones, pre-dating his graduation collection from the Royal College of Art in 2017. It’s engendered a non-stop process that’s taken millennia in fashion terms—well, at least 15 years, by his reckoning. By now, Stewart sees it as less as a theme than a way of working that transmogrified into sculpted corsetry and fluid drape. “The standing stones, that’s a loose reference. None of my stuff looks like a standing stone, it’s just a figure, just an emanation of a powerful ancient figure that I imagine, and that’s how I kind of create something new, he says. “But there’s no references in the collection, there’s no images, there’s no this, that, or the other.”

Inside Stewart’s London atelier.

Photographed by Luc Coiffait