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    Now reading: John Alexander Skelton’s Irish Ode to Cloth and Character

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    John Alexander Skelton’s Irish Ode to Cloth and Character

    In a quietly radical summer collection, John Alexander Skelton trades rigid narratives for instinct, traveling to the west coast of Ireland to street-cast locals, honor personal memory, and let fabric lead the way.

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    There’s a softness to John Alexander Skelton’s Collection XIX that might catch you off guard. If you’ve come to expect the dense historical layering and ritualistic precision of his winter collections, this one feels looser, more intuitive. But that’s the point. “After winter, which is always heavy with narrative and very constructed, I just want the freedom to make,” he says. “The process finds its own rhythm.” 

    That rhythm began with fabric—the foundation of Skelton’s work both technically and creatively. The collection was sparked by a piece of deadstock morning-stripe cloth, traditionally used in funeral suiting, gifted to him by a friend who runs a vintage shop in Paris. “The shop used to belong to a military and equestrian tailor,” Skelton explains. “When my friend took over, he inherited all the fabric. This stripe really struck me. It became the starting point for everything.” 



    From that one fabric came an entire palette: restrained grays and blacks, pale pinks, overdyed aubergines, and champagne-toned florals. “I wanted to bring in softness. That was partly inspired by the landscape we were shooting in—the west coast of Ireland—which has this really gentle, rolling quality. It’s dramatic, but not harsh. There’s a softness to the people, too. A joyfulness.” 

    That joy runs through the collection. “It was just a really joyous process to make and to photograph,” Skelton says. “That’s maybe not something you see immediately in the images, because joy is hard to capture without looking cheesy. But it was there.” 

    The shoot took place across County Mayo and Donegal, chosen partly because of Skelton’s family roots—his grandmother’s family comes from Mayo—and partly as an homage to a trip his grandparents took to the region in the ’90s. “I’d seen these photos around the house since I was a kid,” he says. “It felt like the right time to go.”



    Casting happened on the fly. Skelton and his team made their way from harbors to roadside cafés, and from one pub to the next, striking up conversations and asking locals to model. “We got pretty brazen. At one point we chased down a farmer on a tractor,” he laughs. “But people were so open. The first man we photographed drew a crowd. The whole pub came out to watch. He loved the attention.” 

    The cast ended up being mostly older locals, full of character, personality, and what Skelton calls “presence.” Technically, the collection is among his most ambitious. It includes the designer’s first foray into womenswear, created not just by sizing down menswear pieces, but by drafting new silhouettes and cuts from scratch. “I wanted to do something where the cut was more specific,” he says. “Some of the prints I created were used across multiple fabrics and garment types. Every panel is drawn individually, so each printed piece is unique.” 

    The process was labor-intensive. Skelton hand-draws each element of the print design, then composes the layout manually, often on A0 paper, before scanning and transferring the design to fabric using a reactive dye process that chemically bonds with the textile. “It’s more difficult than pigment printing because if it isn’t done properly, the dye can bleed during washing. But it gives the print depth. It feels part of the fabric, not just sitting on top.” 



    He also incorporated rare Dobby weaves, using old shuttle looms that are slower and more fragile than modern machines. “They’re fussy and they break down a lot, but the result has more character. It’s closer to handwoven cloth.” 

    Tailoring plays a central role in the collection. Skelton spent significant time developing new jacket blocks from scratch, experimenting with lower lapel breaks and slimmer cuts, including a peak-lapel double-breasted jacket that was particularly demanding to get right. He also reworked some jacket silhouettes into summer-weight coats, retaining their sharpness while paring back the bulk. “Because in summer, a coat doesn’t need to be an overcoat. You’re not layering underneath. It can be lighter, closer to the body.” 

    Even the pants reflect this considered approach. A stovepipe silhouette—slimmer at the knee, flaring slightly at the hem—was inspired by an old pair belonging to his grandfather. Elsewhere, shorts appear paired with jackets in soft white, sidestepping the colonial associations of a full white suit in favor of something more relaxed and contemporary. “I like tailoring that doesn’t feel like it has to follow a rulebook,” he says. “There’s all this unspoken stuff about how to wear a suit. I find that really boring. For me, it’s about comfort. I wear all of this myself, and I’m always thinking about how the clothes actually feel. How they make you feel.”

    That sense of ease and self-assurance is what defines Collection XIX. It’s deeply personal and technically complex, yet open, spontaneous, and joyous. It’s about memory and place and character, but also about the quiet rebellion of getting dressed with intention. As Skelton puts it, “Right now, it feels more esoteric, more radical, to wear a suit.”

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