Over the past few months, I’ve been developing Endurance: Threads of Discovery — a knitwear collection inspired by Irish Antarctic explorer Tom Crean, endurance, resilience and the relationship between Irish identity and making.
What I didn’t expect was to uncover another story running quietly alongside it. One much closer to home.
Recently, while my cousin Yvonne Ivory was researching our family history through the 1926 Irish census records, she came across the words “déantóir stocaí” — Irish for “stocking maker”. At first, it felt like a small detail hidden amongst faded handwriting and census forms. But the more we researched, the more a picture began to emerge.
One of the names listed on the census was Caitlín Ó Catháin — my granny.
The records pointed toward Blackrock, Dublin — Carraig Dubh in Irish — and eventually towards Crawford’s Blackrock Hosiery Company, a manufacturer producing stockings and knitted garments in early twentieth-century Ireland.
And suddenly, everything felt strangely connected.
Earlier this year, I attended the first Ireland Fashion Week graduate bootcamp in Blackrock. I remember sitting there excited, nervous and full of ideas at the very beginning of this new chapter — developing the Raeside label under Detta and preparing to showcase work in Dublin as part of Ireland Fashion Week 2026.
At the time, I had absolutely no idea that my own family history was connected to that exact place.
Long before Detta Knitwear existed, long before I learned to link knitwear panels or became immersed in wool, stitch structures and machine knitting, there were women in my own family working within Ireland’s hosiery and textile industry.
Making.
Constructing.
Knitting.
Producing garments by hand and machine during a time when Irish hosiery was respected internationally.
What made the discovery feel even more significant was that I had always known about another connection to clothing and craftsmanship within my family. My grandad on my father’s side worked in Dublin as a gentlemen’s tailor for Mangans, and growing up I was always aware of that tailoring heritage.
But uncovering the hosiery connection through the 1926 census suddenly made me see things differently. On one side of the family there was tailoring and garment construction; on the other, hosiery and knitted production. It made me realise that perhaps my connection to textiles and fashion was never accidental at all.
As someone now developing contemporary Irish knitwear and launching Raeside at Ireland Fashion Week, these discoveries feel deeply significant. Not in a sentimental way, but in a grounding way. A reminder that fashion, textiles and craftsmanship are often inherited through culture, memory and family long before we consciously choose them ourselves.
There’s something incredibly moving about realising that while I’ve been exploring endurance through the story of Tom Crean, I’ve also unknowingly been tracing another kind of endurance — the endurance of Irish textile labour, tailoring, women’s work, making, and generational creativity.
The more I think about it, the more I realise how much this influences the direction of my work.
Detta has always been rooted in storytelling through knitwear — Irish landscapes, exploration, heritage, texture and craftsmanship — but these discoveries add another layer entirely. They connect the work further back than I ever imagined, not only to Ireland culturally, but personally.
It also changes the way I think about Irish fashion history.
So much of Ireland’s textile and garment industry was built quietly through tailoring workshops, knitting rooms, hosiery mills and skilled labour that often goes undocumented in mainstream fashion narratives. Yet these industries shaped communities, livelihoods and generations of makers.
There’s something powerful about returning to Dublin my home town to present contemporary knitwear while carrying family connections to both Irish tailoring and hosiery manufacture.
It feels less like coincidence and more like continuity.
As I continue developing Raeside and Endurance: Threads of Discovery, I keep coming back to the idea that textiles hold memory. Stitch by stitch, thread by thread, stories remain embedded within materials, techniques and traditions — even when we don’t yet know they’re ours.
Maybe some threads were already there long before we started knitting them ourselves.