Story by Editor-at-Large CAROLINA OGLIARO
“Nothing Pure Can Stay” – Róisín Pierce’s Fall/Winter 2025 Collection Captures the Fragility of Beauty at Paris Fashion Week
In a world obsessed with permanence, Róisín Pierce dares to celebrate the ephemeral. With *Nothing Pure Can Stay*, her Fall/Winter 2025 collection presented at Paris Fashion Week, the Irish designer delivers a poetic meditation on beauty, loss, and the delicate balance between preservation and decay. Inspired by literary greats like Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, and Marcel Proust, Pierce transforms fleeting moments into garments that feel both hauntingly transient and timelessly precious.
A Collection Woven with Time Itself
If fashion is storytelling, then Pierce is a master of prose, threading her narrative through fabric, embroidery, and lace. The collection’s title, *Nothing Pure Can Stay*, echoes Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” an ode to impermanence. It is this fragile beauty, like a melting snowflake or a fading memory, that serves as the heartbeat of her designs.
The palette is a whisper: pristine whites, powdered blues, and deep inky hues. Silhouettes ripple with movement as if caught in a gentle breeze before vanishing into the air. Textiles are manipulated into smocked fragments, embroidered forget-me-nots, and feathery tulle formations. Each piece is a quiet protest against time’s relentless passage, an heirloom crafted to endure even as its wearer changes, ages, and ultimately fades.
The Poetry of Fabric: From Snowflakes to Needlework
Pierce’s meticulous attention to craft is evident in every fold, tuck, and stitch. Inspired by Wilson Bentley’s microscopic snowflake photography, she translates ice’s fleeting beauty into couture. Air bubbles of tulle and cotton lace seem to hover atop sheer gowns, while hand-manipulated “snowberries” float over crushed silk. The result? A wardrobe that feels like winter’s breath, light, crisp, and achingly delicate.
But fragility does not mean weakness. Pierce’s commitment to material innovation pushes craftsmanship into new realms. Powdered silk velvet smocking, Irish crochet medals, and deadstock textiles are reshaped into contemporary forms, proving that heritage techniques can still surprise. The act of making itself becomes a form of preservation, a resistance against forgetting.
Collaborations That Blur the Line Between Fashion and Art
To further her vision, Pierce enlists two powerhouse collaborators. Legendary milliner Stephen Jones creates an exclusive line of ethereal headpieces, crowns of ribbons and snowberries, and bows floating like whispers against the skin. These pieces, designed in conversation with Pierce’s silhouettes, feel less like accessories and more like poetic extensions of the garments themselves.
Meanwhile, a collaboration with French leather house Polène brings her aesthetic into the world of accessories. Sculptural bags, crafted in Ubrique, Spain, feature looped bows and precise button lattices, embodying Pierce’s signature balance between fragility and structure. These bags, launching in April 2025, mark an evolution in her brand’s material language, one that gracefully bridges softness with permanence.
A Soundtrack of Transience
The collection’s atmospheric depth is heightened by Simon Parris’s evocative soundtrack, where spoken word and song intermingle like passing ghosts. Pierce’s own voice recites Nabokov and Plath, weaving between traditional Irish melodies sung by her mother. The effect? A sense of nostalgia for something slipping through our fingers, a reminder that even music, like fashion, is momentary.
Róisín Pierce: The Guardian of Fleeting Beauty
In an industry often obsessed with spectacle, Róisín Pierce offers something rarer: quiet, thoughtful artistry. *Nothing Pure Can Stay* is a meditation on time, memory, and the fragile wonders we try to hold onto. In the end, her garments are more than just fabric and thread. They are love letters to impermanence, testaments to the beauty of what cannot last.
And perhaps, that’s what makes them eternal.
