LONDON — The delicate designs of Róisín Pierce, the Dublin-based designer, are making their way into the accessories category.
She has collaborated with the French accessories brand Polène to design two leather bags with the sensibilities of lace that will be presented during Paris Fashion Week.
“Polène was interested in what I was doing in terms of technicality and Irish lace work. It’s all very delicate and feminine, but it’s a real textile approach into the design. It was interesting to see that translated into leather,” said Pierce in an interview.
The first bag in the collection is the Button Bow Sphere style — resembling a thurible or an orb found in a church. The bag is clean in its design, but its origami-style bows and buttons in leather add distinction.
The Button Bow Box bag as part of Róisín Pierce’s collaboration with Polène.
The Button Bow Box is the second bag and uses a rectangular shape that’s been fenced with the same leather detailing as the sphere bag.
Pierce has designed them in three colorways: chalk, deep blue and light blue.
Working with color was a new experiment for the designer and it’s something she’s applied to her fall 2025 collection with inky blues and “satin that manipulates like a dream.”
Pierce, ever the romantic and bookworm, borrowed from the works of Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov and American photographer Wilson Bentley for inspiration.
She titled her collection “Nothing Pure Can Stay,” as a reference to her own personal life.
“It’s about how beautiful things are when they’re not forever and I love the idea of the ephemeral. Snowflakes are such a beautiful thing and they fall from the sky — as letters from heaven,” she said.
The designer looked at Bentley’s photography of snowflakes. In 1931, he published “Snow Flakes,” a book that looked at more than 2,000 snowflakes under a microscope and concluded that no snowflake was ever the same.
Detailing from the Róisín Pierce collaboration with Polène.
In her press notes, she starts off with a quote from Nabokov, taken from when he was lecturing on literature: “Beauty plus pity — that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”
Despite her delicate approach to design, Pierce still has her business hat on.
Last year, she joined the brand development division of Dover Street Market Paris and it has been a blessing to her company.
“Dover Street Market amplifies and speeds things up because I can send them designs and they will say, ‘OK, that’s interesting. Let’s make them with this fabrication.’ Whereas before, I would be doing it all and I wouldn’t have time, which is such a luxury now to have these resources at your fingertips,” said Pierce.
She has used the spare time to take on new projects — an imminent one coming in the summer that she did not reveal.
