The entry of Standing Ground into Paris haute couture has been a long time coming, and was much feted on Monday evening. In 28 slim silhouettes Michael Stewart, the 2024 winner of the LVMH Savoir-Faire Prize, showed not only his very specific vision, but also how he’s evolved his obsessively technical ways of cutting, dressmaking, and embroidering by hand.
“I’m an analogue person,” Stewart said. Everything he does is made in the small atelier he’s built in London, and is fundamentally rooted in his deep affinity for the ancient standing stones of his native Ireland. What’s come out of it is his vision of women as monumental figures who exist without a timeframe between the deep past and an otherworldly present.
The studied impact of his extreme corsetry, achieved in collaboration with London’s legendary Mr. Pearl, and his draping of jersey and velvet, moved through the room in front of a packed audience. Showing at the Irish embassy worked out well for Stewart: It gave a close-up view of his perfectionist, sculptural form-making and the intriguing beading method he’s integrated in various ways to create structure as well as surface embellishment.
The beads, thousands of them, are fed one-by-one into individual channels, sometimes to invisible effect. A stone-colored coat dress had visible raised lines running around its contours and the dramatic caped collar. They were there too in the kicked-out peplum of a black jacket, with a frontage Stewart called a ‘cow-catcher.’ “ The shape is given by the beads, and it holds itself because of the way they’ve been put in.” His aesthetic watchword is “opulent,” only his kind of extravagance is clothes that don’t blare their expense but “look really, really resolved and magnificently executed.”
In the past two years, Stewart has lavished attention on perfecting new approaches. A stunning long, slim black dress had rivulets of beads appearing as if in its cracks— maybe inspired by some geological feature. Apart from his signature hip-emphasizing draped jersey dresses, he’s introduced a faggoting method that imitates Celtic knots.
And to underline and celebrate his Irishness, there was the outlier in the collection, a full white lace made-in-Ireland wedding dress worn by a barefoot Kristen McMenamy. “It’s called Carrickmacross lace. I thought it perfect to show the heritage and craft-based skills of Ireland, and bring them onto the stage in Paris that I feel they deserve to be in,” Stewart said, looking emotional. “I approached the Design and Craft Council of Ireland and the Heritage Council, and asked if they would support the making of this.” The women of county Monaghan, the few specialists left, come from a tradition that once contributed to the wedding dresses of Princess Diana and Catherine Middleton. “In total we had 26 hands on the making of this dress, and it took them 4,000 hours.”
That’s the kind of statistic haute couture insiders go for. With this step, Michael Stewart crossed over from being a lone outsider in London to being accepted as a Paris insider. “I feel like I’m on the threshold of something really different now,” he smiled. “The clients have been coming in the past couple of weeks—the style, everything’s just opening up.”
