Posted online: Feb 25th, 2010

By Sinéad Flanagan
Editor

KILDARE design student, Clara Traynor, has been selected as one of 20 finalists in the Nokia Young Fashion Designer Award 2010.
The design from the final year Naas native was chosen from thousands of designs submitted by design college students across Ireland.
“I wasn’t expecting it at all,” Clara beemed to Kildare Post.
Clara is currently a student at the Limerick School of Art and Design based her design on locomotion and the movement of the human body, dubbing it ‘Do the Locomotion’.
However, having spent time deciding her design, Clara says in the end she was left with just two weeks to put it together. With “thousands and thousands” of beads incorporated in the design, the bubbly student says “there was about a week of all night sowing. There’s 15 metres of fabric covered in sequence.”
Clara’s design will be in the Nokia Young Fashion Design Award exhibition on Wednesday, 24th March. This year the format of the event is changing to an exhibition, which will be open daily to the public from Thursday, 25th March to Sunday, 28th March, so fans of design and fashion in Kildare why not pop along and support your local talent! As each entrant had to pick a piece of music for the final show to support their design, Clara picked a piece that she feels is very close to her roots. With her cousin Karen McCarthney having just released a single with band Cowboy X, “the electro and techno beat which is kind of part of Nokia sounds perfect for it.”
All finalists will be judged by a panel of industry experts including some leading figures in Irish and international fashion. Judges include Autograph designer at Marks and Spencer, Marc O’Neill, Irish designer, Aideen Bodkin, ASOS Buying Director, Caren Downie and Creative Director of Avoca, Amanda Pratt. Judges will be looking for original, imaginative and inspired designs that make people sit up and take notice, an expression of individuality and fun.