A woman of substance
A decade-long collaboration with Dunnes Stores has taken Joanne Hynes mainstream, but the fashion designer has kept her avant-garde sensibility and channelled it into a variety of artistic ventures, discovers Marie Kelly.
Joanne Hynes is wondering what to do with her archive. She can donate it, store it or keep a selection that’s reflective of the work she’s most proud of. For a designer who consistently draws on her past to inform future work, the conundrum of what to do with the tangible effects of a nearly 30-year career is as much a spiritual issue as a practical one. “I’m quite emotional about it,” Hynes admits. “It’s time and a life. I don’t know if I can ever move away from the past. It’s always with me and it’s a key part of the work.”
A graduate of Limerick College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins in London, Hynes set up her eponymous label in 2003 so this archive spans more than three decades of creativity as a student and designer, and now it is the basis of a brand new collection – the first outside of her Dunnes Stores collaboration since she joined forces with the high-street giant almost ten years ago. “Working with Dunnes has been amazing,” she explains. “Margaret Heffernan is a woman who really understands fashion. She’s not in that space per se, but she appreciates it. She’s followed my work and has allowed me a small space within what they do to fly the flag for what I do.”
The partnership with Dunnes Stores has made Hynes a household name. At the company’s Georges Street HQ, she works with a “very small, intimate team” to create dynamic pieces of ready-to-wear, and for Hynes, there’s a huge value in being in that George’s Street building. “I love that connection. It keeps me real, grounded,” she explains.
It would be easy to lose that sense of connection when one of the most successful Irish singer-songwriters in recent times is wearing your designs. CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) chose a Joanne Hynes archive dress to wear to the Mercury Prize Event in 2024. “She came to my studio and tried on lots of things,” says Hynes. “She told me she’d been buying and wearing my collections for years, saving up for them. I didn’t realise people felt like that.” The 29-year-old chose a green sequinned dress designed by Hynes in 2006 to which they added circular crystals at the breasts. “We just had fun with it,” says Hynes.
Playfulness is a big part of Hynes’s design personality. “When we started the collection for Dunnes, the word we came up with was ‘enjoy’. ‘Enjoy Joanne Hynes’. That was kind of its purpose,” she explains.
But, she adds: “There’s a duality to me as a designer. Conceptual brands like Comme des Garçons and Maison Margiela are where my heart is. Finding those references when I was younger, I thought, oh my God I’m home!” Both the Japanese and French brands are strongly associated with the austerity of black and white respectively, yet during her MA at Central Saint Martins (where she sat beside the legendary Kim Jones of Dior fame), the late professor of fashion design Louise Wilson told Hynes: “That’s your thing Joanne, colour.”
CMAT came to my studio and tried on lots of things. She told me she’d been buying and wearing my collections for years, saving up for them. I didn’t realise people felt like that.
“I used to make colour compositions, but the proportions were always massively important to me,” explains the designer. “I was always trying to say something new with how the colours sat beside each other. Colour really was a vehicle to create newness.” It still is for Hynes and it’s how she has deftly negotiated her design DNA with Dunnes Stores’ mainstream brand positioning. “There are spaces I don’t go to in my work for Dunnes, things I know aren’t right for there. So there’s been certain things I’ve been able to do and certain things I haven’t.” She describes her new collection-in-progress, designed from her own studio in Co Wicklow, as “another space, another way to work”.
For this collection, she’s playing with materials that she’s always had a relationship with: aran and brocade to name two. “I’ve gone back to the handknit arans from 2002 – aran has become a big topic right now because we’re all looking at home and the meaning of it – and I’ve reworked older items and deconstructed them into new things. I’m also working with some of my dresses from 1999.” The collection is at an early stage – Hynes has designs and prototypes – but she says the pace feels right. “I’m feeling really good about it,” she says. “Newness is the thing that really keeps me alive, the excitement of it.”
Hynes is a multi-faceted creative and the urge for newness and exploration led to her first solo art exhibition two years ago at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin. Called What We Carry With Us, the show featured a mix of new clothing, archive garments, found objects and written texts and was described as a “reflection on design thinking from 25 years in fashion, marking a point of reconciliation in her creative practice”. Hynes explains: “There’s a dialogue between design and fine art and I’ve always felt at the intersection of it. Fine art has always been my home but through the materiality of fashion.” Colour was largely absent from the show with the exception of red – fleshy tones dominated – and Hynes explains that her new solo collection is an extension of the work she created for this space. “I’ve resolved it more into garments, but it’s all part of one story,” she says.
That story will soon include Hynes’ first book, which she’s just finished a first draft of. “It feels a bit weird talking about something that hasn’t been launched into the world yet, but it’s a study of memory in relation to my memory and my life,” she explains. She’s quick to clarify that it’s not a memoir. “To write a memoir, I’d have to be prepared to share a lot and there’s a conflict in relation to that.”
Hynes is an incredibly private individual. She also describes herself as sentimental and melancholy. There’s certainly a deep reflectiveness that comes across during our conversation, especially when she speaks about her writing. “My relationship with writing is like my relationship with time; it’s deeply personal. I have sketchbooks and notebooks from as far back as 1996 where I’m writing about a design, or a feeling, or a woman or a place.”
Sketching and writing are both interwoven through Hynes’s design process and she speaks passionately about “being in the process”. “That’s what being a creative is. I love being in that shifting place and I’ve just found myself really deep in that over the past four or five years,” she says. All the Tuam native ever wanted was to work for herself. “Of course I interviewed with Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Stella McCartney after college,” she says. “I remember Stella McCartney asking me if I could do sexy. I was horrified! Of course I could do sexy, but was it something I wanted to do at the time? Probably not!” She reflects that if she was starting again now, she’d work for a large fashion house, just to see the mechanics of it all.
“But I’ve come to the point where I’m really happy with the creative life I’ve lived,” admits Hynes. “I’ve resisted the urge to take on the world. I’m not interested in being stocked in every store. I just never felt that was reflective of who I was as a designer. I thought, let’s just take the best of this and put it into a smaller package.” There’s still plenty more for Hynes to unwrap though. “I always need to be making and doing,” she says, “and in many ways I feel like I have a new creative life beginning. I can feel the energy of that right now.”
She may not have taken on the world, but who knows what’s around the corner for Hynes. CMAT recently posted on her Instagram feed: “It’s a genuine, more than daily occurrence that if I wear Joanne Hynes on the streets of New York, people will cross the road/almost run into me with their car to ask me who I’m wearing!”. I think the world is Hynes’s oyster if she wants it.
This article was originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, November 2025