Belfast-based designer Rebekah Murphy is the youngest person showing at Ireland Fashion Week 2026 and has just finished her first year of Textile design and Fashion at the Belfast School of Art, with her own brand in the works for the summer.
Speaking with RSVP Live, she discusses the struggles of finding affordable studio space, her childhood in Belfast, and the epicentre of Irish fashion.
Growing up in Belfast, it’s clear the area has had an effect on her work: “Living here post everything that has happened here has influenced my work. I feel like people in Belfast have a way of storytelling that is quite nuanced, that they don’t necessarily tell things quite heavily.
“They like to pick up the light parts of it. So when my mum or my dad was telling me stories about growing up, there would be this really heavy day, and they would say, ‘but it’s okay because we went to the pub after’ or something like that. They picked up the fun parts. So I try to do that a lot with my work, do the kind of lighter, more quirky bits of storytelling rather than focusing on the heavy thing that it might actually be about.”
Rebekah works from her bedroom, as there is a stark amount of studio spaces in the country: “The price of rent in Ireland at the moment is insane to try to get a studio. My best friend and I, she’s a painter. She just graduated. So, we were looking at a studio together, but it’s totally not feasible even with two people.”
The designer was set on becoming a painter with her uni applications all sorted until she met fellow designer Rion Hannora at Dublin’s RDS for a school trip: “This is such a tangible space for design. It was the first time I’ve seen Irish design up close. On the bus journey home to Belfast. I pulled out of three of the uni options I had been accepted for and applied for a foundation year instead because I was like, ‘Right, I like that, but I can’t sew.’
“I have no knowledge about this. I was daunted by applying just for fashion. I did a foundation year last year, and I loved it. I fell in love with the fashion.
“I got to actually work with Rion on her Dublin fashion show, and it was class.
“She’s insane, and she’s so down to earth, that was one of the things that made me realise people actually talk to you here. This is a real community down here, and I always thought there’s nothing like this happening in Belfast.”
Witnessing Belfast’s fashion scene first-hand, Rebekah says, “it has really, really taken off.”
“I’ve spoken to one of my mentors, Lucinda Graham, about it, and she was really like, ‘You’re touching on something that’s on the top of everybody’s tongue at the moment,’ that Dublin is this kind of false epicentre of fashion.”
“Being part of Ireland Fashion Week this year, I’ve got to meet so many people from every corner of Ireland. Without Ireland Fashion Week, the opportunity for us to meet would have been nil. So, it’s really great to have this kind of hub where we can all meet, chat, and get to know each other as designers from every part, not just Dublin designers.”
Rebekah has experimented with all sorts of pieces that always tie into some aspect of Irish history, including her Punt Ties.
“So I took inspiration from the punts, going out of currency, and the women being legally guaranteed entry into the pub in 2004. I wasn’t old enough to remember, but my mum and dad would still recall it even with Euros. They always had a punt purse that they kept in the car for whenever they were going down south or anything like that. So that was another weird thing that was in my ear whenever I was designing that.”
She also experimented with making bikinis and briefs, yet not with the typical material, but with an old football, which was a “total nightmare” to craft.
“Growing up, there was never a night you walked into the living room, in the kitchen, and the TV didn’t have football on. It used to do my head, and I was like, ‘Wow, we’re still watching football. You don’t even support these teams.’
“We had a ball in our back garden since we were kids, and we never used to play football or anything like that. I used to think it was so silly. It was obviously quite worn and torn to shreds, and I am a firm believer that my idea of sustainability is that everything you need exists in the world. There is no point in buying crazy fabrics or anything like that to communicate what you’re trying to do.
“So, I cut up this football, asking, ‘Is anybody going to use this? ‘No.’ ‘Right, okay.’ I took it into my room, and I cut it up, and the leather is really thick. These specific footballs also have a kind of ‘plasticky coating’. I think it’s for rain and similar things. So I cut it up and made a bikini out of it.
“I remember my sister opening the door, and she was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I replied, ‘It’s a football bikini.’ And she just said, ‘Okay.’ But that was for my collection last year. which was about kind of reminiscence of girlhood, and kind of what I remember through rose-tinted glasses, you always remember that, that’s the funny part of how I felt about it.
“My collection last year was all around the parts of a memory that you thought were really flippant at the time. I quit dance, and that was part of the collection last year, but I only really remember the nice aspects of it. I was really flippant about it at the time and didn’t want anything to do with dance. So last year, I was living in that memory, picking out the bits I remembered that were really positive about dance.”
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