The Tweed Project
For restauranteur Aoibheann McNamara, co-founding The Tweed Project was a natural progression from slow food to slow fashion.
Aoibheann McNamara is a single mum who’s juggling two jobs, three if you count the Airbnb. She has horses, a beehive, and a wild hazel forest at her 32-acre plot in the Burren. Yet she says she’s not busy.
“I don’t want to be busy,” she says categorically. And what Aoibheann wants, Aoibheann gets – by putting her heart and soul into what she does and doing it with a purpose.
Case in point is The Tweed Project, which she founded with her business partner and friend Triona Lillis in 2014 at the Drop Everything festival on Inis Oírr.
“We were motivated to create a fashion range using our indigenous Irish fabrics,” she says, namely tweed, linen, Arran wool. “Because we really loved the fabrics. But were frustrated with how they were being designed.”
There is something about tweed that does, somehow, conjure up pipe smells. Maybe even someone lost in a field. Thankfully these preconceptions are quickly changing.
Now, Aoibheann says the fashion space for Irish fabrics is vibrantly contemporary: “It’s really amazing and dynamic. We’re really happy sitting in with that.”
ART DE VIVRE
After having studied art and archaeology, Aoibheann started off not knowing what to do with her life. Let alone ‘career’.
“[I wasn’t] really sure what I wanted to do at all, spent a month in a Buddhist centre, was cooking there and it kind of just happened,” she says of her calling to the make food for a living. “It was pretty strong when it happened.”
She says she thrives on how good food affects people positively: “You can transform through a bowl of soup – it’s very primal.”
Her restaurant Ard Bia (meaning high food in case you need to brush up on your Irish) has been going strong in Galway for 22 years now, delivering unpretentiously delicious food. “Everything I do is informed by the preservation of the past,” she says. Foods we always ate, fabrics we always used.
“I think we can never be informed about now if we don’t know the past, and if we can’t honour the past there is no future,” she adds. To do that in the restaurant she chooses food that’s been “beautifully produced” by small suppliers, the way it used to be pre-supermarkets.
But slow food isn’t a term she thinks we should be banging on about. For her, it’s simply the way things should be. “Unfortunately it’s not the way it is so people shout about it,” she says.
She feels really lucky to be living the life she has in Galway, but she also believes that anyone who’s under pressure in their life, to the extent that it robs them of fundamental pleasures like eating wholesome meals, should look at how to change it.
“If you can change it, you need to change it. And slow everything down. If you can,” she says. “‘Cause if we’re at the point where we can’t eat properly then very soon we’ll get sick and very soon there just won’t be anything anymore.”
FASHION AS ART
For Aoibheann, art is not just about exhibiting it in the restaurant – which she believes in, and she does without taking commission. There’s more to it than that. “People don’t need to be pigeon-holed as a trained artist,” she says. “Art is even arranging a bunch of flowers or painting a chair in a particular colour.”
On The Tweed Project Aoibheann and Triona are artistic too, coming up with ideas that they like and turning them into clothing. A talented maker, also based in Galway, then stitches the pieces together. Everything is designed, produced and inspired by the west of Ireland.
No catwalks then? “We dispel the myths around what we’re supposed to do with fashion and that’s very important to us,” Aoibheann says. “So we’re not pushing out product, we’re producing when we want in a very small and organic way.”
Aoibheann describes their fashion brand as a seasonal and says she doesn’t like planning ahead, even for the restaurant: “We just move as we feel we want to” and “it just happens”.
That means you never know what the next collection will bring. Think anything from oversized shirts and structured bustiers to reversible gilets and leg warmers. But there is one thing that doesn’t change and that’s the small quantities they produce. Everything is made to order. Their current Mega-shrooms collection, for example, features a handful of items mostly made with white Irish linen. And they’re busy working on their next release, which will feature soft furnishings, from blankets to pillows and bed linen, and will see them working with hotels. All in the same materials and small batches.
And it looks like this model is paying off financially. “We had a phenomenal year last year,” says Aoibheann. “The problem is Triona and I work separately, in different areas so it’s difficult from a taxation point of view.”
NOT ON A SCHEDULE
So what’s Aoibheann’s not-hectic-but-still-kinda-hectic schedule like? “I cut down a fair bit in the restaurant because I have an amazing team [of 33 people],” she says. In the kitchen, the 15 cooks devise the menus driven by what’s coming in, whether it’s courgette flowers, a type of fish or mushrooms. She does that three days a week.
She’ll then spend another bit of time on The Tweed Project: “Triona is often out on films so I look after that solely when she’s away.” And then there’s the Burren with the rental, horses, bees and foraging.
Most importantly, her son’s in school and she’s looking after him too. “And then doing other projects,” she adds, mysteriously. “It’s all kind of easy and nice.”
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