Gallery Magazine: Úna Burke comes to the Gallery Shop

Úna Burke, the armour-inspired leather designer to Lady Gaga, speaks to Aoife Barry about her new William Blake-themed accessories for the Gallery Shop

The leather designer Úna Burke grew up in a home where handmade crafts weren’t just encouraged – they were a family passion. “One of my first memories was of stitching on the sewing machine when I was very young and being quite good at it,” the 45-year-old says. Like her mother, she made clothes, cushions and embroidery. At night, she dreamed of models on a catwalk.

Meanwhile, she had a shoemaker grandfather. “I guess it’s in the blood,” she says of leather-working. “I have my grandfather’s awl [for piercing leather], which was his father’s – and his father’s.” Despite this generational pedigree, he likely never imagined his granddaughter would become a designer for stars such as Madonna (a form-fitting hip corset), films including The Hunger Games series (a forearm brace worn by its star Jennifer Lawrence), and be selling layered, studded bags or sculptural bustiers.

Childhood memories reveal more hints of Burke’s future fascination with leather. “I remember finding my mum and my grandmother in the corner of a craft shop in Spiddal [County Galway], sniffing the leather purses,” she says with a laugh. “That was my first awareness of leather itself as a material, and sharing their love of it because of its longevity, and how it changes and gets more beautiful with age.”

Her design journey began at Limerick School of Art and Design in 1998 and was furthered by working with Philip Treacy and Burberry, followed by an MA at the London College of Fashion in 2006. Drawn to using leather to make structural forms, she learned that chrome-tanned leathers were too soft. Discovering sturdier vegetable-tanned leather was a revelation, and it became her calling card.

Emerging from her studies into recession-era London, Burke worked in a clothes shop by day and made her own pieces at night. But her 2009 MA graduate collection RE.TREAT had caught the eyes of the fashion world, and she was soon fielding requests from magazines and celebrities. “I’d go home in the evenings and I would be getting emails from Vogue, W Magazine and Dazed & Confused. My first commission was for Lady Gaga,” she says, referencing the custom leather bodysuit, boots, arm braces and face mask that Burke made for the singer’s The Monster Ball Tour in 2009.

Her work is as at home in a gallery as it is on a body, and collectors of her figurative art pieces include designer Phillip Lim – yet there can be misconceptions around leather. Some of Burke’s designs, such as the body accessories, are assumed to have a sexual edge. “It seems that everything has to be put in a box, whereas I like to push people to think outside of the box,” she says. “I see it as an artform – the styling of these pieces as a means of creative expression. It’s reflecting your life, really, what you’re seeing.”

In 2020, Burke and her young family moved from London to her hometown of Knockvicar in County Roscommon. Her studio is now situated in her childhood home, a historic Georgian mansion called Riversdale House, where her bay window overlooks Lough Key.

When in Dublin, she visits the National Gallery of Ireland for how “peaceful” it is. But she’s particularly drawn to Jack B. Yeats’s paintings because “there’s a wildness about his work”. These are qualities Burke is exploring in a new collaboration with the National Gallery of Ireland Shop, to design a purse and two cuffs, inspired by the exhibition William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy. The products launch when the exhibition opens in April.

Blake was “always making people question things”, says Burke. “I’m interested in making people question norms and what we think we know.” She was enraptured by the graphic details in Blake’s paintings and by his background in engraving and etching (she has used etching on some of the designs).

From early on, Burke’s work has taken inspiration from resilience. “We’re all born the same, but life moulds us in different ways,” she says. She saw resilience first-hand in how her late mother Tina dealt with rheumatoid arthritis. “I called her the queen of the silver lining,” she says. “She taught me how to survive and to find the good in the bad.” Though Burke doesn’t make this theme explicit, her customers have nonetheless picked up on it. “People have bought my bracelets for friends who are going through cancer treatment,” she says. “That means more to me than any big names.”

Burke’s hand-crafted leather creations clearly make the wearer feel they can summon a new power within themselves. Or as she puts it: “It’s about making people feel like their own warrior.”

Aoife Barry writes a weekly arts column for The Sunday Times Ireland and is the author of Social Capital. To purchase Úna Burke’s new products, visit the Gallery Shop in person or online here as part of our William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy collection.