Designer Colin Burke consistently pushes the boundaries of knitwear. He talks to Marie Kelly about his most ambitious collection to date.
On her wedding day, Colin Burke’s grandmother wore a peplum jacket that now, decades later, has become the starting point for his most personal collection yet. This season’s hero piece, the Brook sweater, takes the peplum silhouette and reinterprets it through the lens of an Aran knit, while maintaining the signature voluminous sleeve shape that has come to define his eponymous brand. It stands as a defining piece in a collection that marks Burke’s most ambitious to date. It’s also a clear expression of his instinct to challenge and reshape silhouette while remaining deeply rooted in his heritage.
For a designer who has built a hugely successful brand around a signature architectural-sleeve sweater, each season presents a delicate balancing act between honouring the codes his clients know and love, while continuing to challenge the boundaries of his own design language. “As a designer, you’re trying to offer something different but also maintain the aesthetic clients have fallen in love with. You can’t lose the essence of your brand,” explains Burke.
For the Galway native, who describes himself as an “architect for the body”, this essence is distilled into two defining tenets: structure and silhouette. “I’ve realised as I’ve designed this collection that these pillars are the most important things to me. Working with quality yarns and mixing materials is not enough. I want to innovate all of the time and I lose interest in the design phase if I don’t feel I’ve created something new. There’s a great sense of satisfaction with this collection for that reason.”
For a designer whose point of view is so contemporary, the enduring influence of his grandmother is striking. Maureen Burke – the namesake of Burke’s original sweater design – spent a year as a fashion buyer in New York in the late 1950s before moving back to Ireland. “She was always impeccably dressed,” says Burke. “She wore a brooch every day and her colour palette was always muted.” Burke explains that she was a constant presence in his life until she passed away ten years ago. “She gave me all of her old family photographs and her wedding album. They’re amazing references to look back at.”
Like his grandmother, Burke takes a restrained approach to colour and this collection repeats his trademark palette of cream, taupe, navy, black, grey and deep green. Italian metallic Lurex yarns, introduced last year, make a stronger showing this season. Among the standout pieces is the Crugar gown — a hand-crocheted, full-length dress rendered in this lustrous yarn. Available in silver or gold, it is constructed from more than 250 hand-crocheted circles of varying sizes, painstakingly joined by hand. It looks like liquid metal but with an ethereal quality. The Roma top, a rose crochet lace top available in gold or silver Lurex, has the same luminosity.
For a designer who has built a hugely successful brand around a signature architectural-sleeve sweater, each season presents a delicate balancing act between honouring the codes his clients know and love, while continuing to challenge the boundaries of his own design language.
“The gold and silver Lurex yarns are more prominent this season,” says Burke. “They elevate a piece into occasion wear if that’s what the client requires.” Understanding and responding to what clients want is especially important to Burke, given that a significant proportion of his customer base is repeat clients. “When I started my business, the sweaters were all oversized, but now, some clients want pieces that are more tailored to the body,” he says.
The Ellis skirt, hand-crocheted in soft Italian wool, and the Weir skirt, hand-knit in the same tactile yarn, lean into Burke’s evolving aesthetic for body-sculpting silhouettes. Both are constructed with an elongated, fitted rib-stitch waistband, from which a pleat or wave falls to create contrasting volume. Better still, both come with pockets — Burke thinks of everything. “Creating a hand-knit piece that contours the body can be challenging because I want to use the strongest design features to create that flattering shape, but the techniques involved aren’t always straightforward to execute by hand.”
Developing a new design takes Burke several months. The process begins with sketching, followed by knitting swatches in a variety of stitches, which he then uses to shape silhouettes directly on a mannequin. “The design stages are very intense,” reveals the 31-year-old. “I experiment with vast numbers of complex stitches as each will hold differently. I’ve got to be sure I’ve chosen the correct placement so each garment falls exactly as I’ve anticipated when it’s worn.”
Burke has been trialling the Brook sweater and Petrina peplum jacket since last November — it’s been many months of trial and error, calculating the increases, decreases and placement of every stitch to perfect the peplum style, which remarkably, has no visible seams; you can’t see where the back meets the front or where the sides are joined. “I’d consider seams complete eyesores,” says Burke, who admits he’s his own worst critic. “But being critical is great, because you’re perfecting all of the time. I want someone to look at one of my pieces and have no idea where it began and ended.” Clients, he adds, are often amazed that each piece is handmade; every style delivers the same luxurious fit, feel and weight on the body, regardless of shape or size.
Havana in Donnybrook is Burke’s longest-standing stockist. He’s notoriously selective about where his pieces are sold and he recently added The Boutique at Adare Manor to that carefully curated roster. “My brand feels really at home there,” he says. He’s also stocked at Les Jumelles in Galway and Timeless on Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast, where his Dove Aran cardigan recently found its way into the hands of one of the most recognisable women on the planet — someone so high-profile that Burke has been asked not to name her in print.
It’s the latest — and most A-list — name to be linked to Burke’s designs, following a string of high-profile fans including Nicola Coughlan, Trinny Woodall and Roma Downey, alongside Kelly Rutherford, who modelled Burke’s SS26 collection in Paris last summer. One particular shade is selling especially well in Martha’s Vineyard, Burke explains. “I’m told the taupe pairs beautifully with Hermès’ leather goods — customers are matching their cardigans to their accessories,” he says.
Many of Burke’s clients travel to Galway to buy from him directly. It’s less like a shopping trip for them and more of a pilgrimage — not unlike travelling to Paris to buy a piece of Chanel on the Rue Cambon. Burke’s customers are investing in generational pieces, and for many, visiting the place where each one begins – where the heritage behind the work is tangible – is part of what gives these pieces their heirloom status. In the West of Ireland, they can understand the narrative first-hand, from the centuries of craft to the hands that shape every stitch. It’s this story that is passed down with the sweater, and that is exactly what Burke set out to create.
He has no shortage of stories from meeting clients over the years. “They buy my knitwear to have for a lifetime,” he says. “They’re not thinking of cost-per-wear, they’re thinking of each piece being left to the next generation because these are pieces that time won’t affect; they’ll always have relevance in your wardrobe.”
Like his luxury knitwear, Burke’s ambition is the quiet kind — innovative silhouettes, generational value and considered stockists. As any great architect would, he designs to last. A small Irish label, quietly going global.
This article was originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, November 2026