Róisín Pierce is on a winning streak. The Irish designer was honoured with the 2026 Golden Fleece Special Merit for Irish Craft Excellence at a recent ceremony at the City Assembly House in Dublin. Dressed in black, Pierce was accompanied by her right hand, and mother, Angela Pierce, to accept the award in the craft and applied art category. The prize, awarded to practitioners of craft and textile innovation, is another string to Pierce’s bow.

The marriage of poetry and provenance has defined her work since her debut. Pierce has woven a tale of ebullience and elegy, emotion and intuition, as she uplifts Ireland’s textile heritage while reflecting upon the darker aspects of its institutional injustices against women. Following years of international recognition, from Chanel to LVMH and Paris Fashion Week, Pierce is especially proud to receive an honour in her hometown. Her next act will deploy windfall from the prize to deepen her exploration of women’s craft heritage with a focus on crochet, smocking and Mountmellick embroidery.

Pierce tells IMAGE, “I am excited by the prospect of stepping into untouched ground, new design and challenging beautiful crafts, by women’s strength and softness. I want to give the gift of excitement and beauty, so that my girls, my clients, are excited to wear the stories we weave for them. I feel I’ve become more devoted to this vocation.”

Congratulations on receiving the Golden Fleece Merit Award! What does this recognition mean to you at this point in your career?
I am honoured that the prize is born of Ireland, a nation where craft is held in such high esteem and benefits from a wonderfully rich history. Each freshly imagined expression of lace, crochet, and smocking at Rósín Pierce is an act of preservation for intergenerational skill, passed onto me by my mother, which I have then stewarded with care. We draw, with care, upon this beautiful heritage, evolving generational crafts that inform our womenswear design, so in that context, it means a great deal. Whilst we are a luxury fashion brand, we are rooted in design, in art, in craft. That a jury of such diverse experience and sensibilities recognised that in our work and seeing our purity of expression is incredibly meaningful. Because we show at Paris Fashion Week and we have worked on collaborations with people and fellow brands we truly respect, it is perhaps difficult for those on the outside to see that the work and innovation happens largely at the hands of two people – me and my mother; the design, the meticulous craft, the production, almost all of it in-house. An award such as this honours that very personal undertaking and commitment to artistry and, hopefully, becomes a beacon for others to recognise it too.

You’ve spoken about the emotional and generational significance of craft in your work. Did receiving this award shift or deepen that perspective in any way?
Through time, I have come to recognise more deeply the unique nature of what we are doing. Designing through emotion, intuition, and connection has always been within the roots of the brand but, with this award, it comes closer to the surface as I more consciously understand their ability to shape an evolution of a technique, or indeed a full collection. The textures we create, our trailing swirls of delicate crochet, three-dimensional blooms, and undulating sculptural forms, are all histories rendered in stitches and cloth.

I look back at the collections we have created and think, these wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t experienced what I have experienced. There has always been an emotional layer to my creation. We refer to Irish lace as hope lace, because it saved our country from the famine. ‘Nothing Pure Can Stay’ was an endeavour to eternalise the ephemeral, capture the beauty that dies. Our forget-me-nots were embroidered into cloth, a meditation on the fleeting. Some of my most beautiful work comes from real sadness but the melancholy and the joyful can harmonise in our textures and our clothes. It’s all energy.

Has your approach to storytelling through textiles shifted as your brand continues to grow?
We have always told layered stories of resistance, of beauty, of grief. They are light and frothy, woeful, sad, and romantic, often all at once. I have so much I want to say and to explore. In fact, it can be frustrating. There is so much I want to put out into the world but I also want to pace myself to make truly rare and beautiful designs. To put too many ideas in a collection can have a diluting effect.

We also have narratives and techniques that we carry through each collection, which have been present since day one. We like to design in a way where each of the collections communicates with each other, each piece belongs in the same floating, floral world. It means the customer who has been with us since the beginning finds that her wardrobe grows rather than resets. The fabrications and rare silhouettes we choose allow for endless iteration. They are love notes to the future. Smocking, crocheting, and unique pattern cutting, expressed in a pure palette of all-white, act as identifying anchors for the many artistic and personal narratives we explore.

Thematically, women’s rights in my country, links to the laundries, hidden crafts, mine and my family’s experiences, and women’s work are also ever-present, grounding our innovation and design as we create bridges to new stories, new generations. Taking this approach means I never look back and fail to recognise the brand or myself in previous collections. There is no sense of estrangement. My first collection, ‘Mná I Bláth’, remains one of my favourites. It brought the hidden dark secrets to the forefront, all wrapped in ribbons, florettes and cotton lace. To be sweet is to say your point, without them knowing. The depth of meaning we hold so tight makes it impossible to detach our designs and the way we reinterpret traditional techniques from their roots. There will always be a thread of emotion, even trauma, behind the sweetness, so when I see it copied and pasted elsewhere, robbed of the meaning and the memories that inform it, it becomes pedestrian, digestible. They have taken the bloom but left the roots behind.

What are you currently working on, and how does it build on or depart from your previous collections?
Each collection envelops the last yet arrives with its own themes, its own meaning, and message. There will be many material explorations, new techniques and everything that lives within the Rósín Pierce world: the sweet, the sensual, the odd, the intense, the holy, the floral. As I said previously, there is so much I want to explore in this collection, and beyond. I am inspired by many things, by beauty, by love, by loss, by tradition, by lived experiences. I call upon the histories of the famine, the Magdalene Laundries, the tender sadness of burial shrouds stitched into bridal trousseaux, and the Committee of Evil Literature. I don’t always know where I end and the work begins and I have stopped trying to find out, instead practicing living in the moment and learning again to enjoy the process rather than just the arrival. I want this collection to be born from a magical place.

Looking ahead, what feels most important for you to protect or prioritise as your brand continues to expand?
My time, my energy, and the designs themselves. I always protect the craft too, of course. I am committed to a rejection of working fast or being commercial as a means to an end. I am very careful in approaching scaling. I am not chasing expansion; I am committed purely and wholly to the brand. This means every piece begins with me. It is my own exploration and vision and I see a purity in that. I could never put my name to something that wasn’t truly mine. I wouldn’t know how. More than expansion or growth, I have always believed in a reason to create, and I have been given many. Perhaps, more than I would have chosen, but they have become the tender seeds from which the beauty of my work grows.

Photography by @roisinpierce.