Niall
Casey

Collection Work

Digital

CLO

Pattern cutting. PDS

Tech-pack

Rural Armour

My project Rural armour centres around identity and growing up queer in rural Ireland. It focuses on the tensions between masculinity, queerness, and isolation in rural Ireland. Growing up in south Kerry I saw how masculinity was both a performance and a form of survival – enforced through sports, labour and tradition. For those who didn’t conform, like me, life in rural Ireland could feel like a battlefield requiring its own kind of armour.

This collection blends the ideas of fighting with my own femininity and adhering to masculine norms. It shows how clothing can be both a shield and a statement, blending the ruggedness of traditional Irish workwear and sportswear with elements of restriction, concealment and defiance. I used mostly red cotton ticking stripe – a fabric traditionally associated with workwear, durability, and domestic spaces. Its rigid structure and repetitive lines mirror the constraints of rural masculinity and nods to vintage sportswear. The silhouettes blend the ideas of utilitarian workwear with elements of restriction, defiance and self expression.

Through rural armour, I explore how clothing becomes both a shield and a statement, embodying both the push and pull of belonging, survival, and identity in places where masculinity has long been a rigid scrip