Progeny & Power: Designer Tarika Kinney Weaves Her Matriarchal Lineage Into Living Garments

Belfast-born designer Tarika Kinney doesn’t just make clothes; she resurrects memory. Her graduate collection Progeny, unveiled at Glasgow School of Art is less a debut than a declaration. Across translucent knitwear, cast surfaces and fraying edges preserved like relics, Kinney constructs a personal archive of womanhood, ancestry and renewal.

Images @earl_sweatshirt

“I’ve always seen fashion as a second skin, tactile, intimate, constantly evolving,” she tells me. That sentiment runs through every decision she makes. Kinney doesn’t treat garments as products. She treats them as continuations, of lineage, of touch, of story.

Born into a cross-religious Indian and Irish family, she describes her upbringing as “a house full of contrast, but also full of care.”

“I came from a lot of love and a lot of cultural awareness,” she says.

Image Tarika Kinney

That duality pulses through Progeny. Crafted using techniques passed down through generations, lace knitting, drop stitches, heat pressing and casting: the collection holds tradition in one hand and innovation in the other. Some methods are inherited, some entirely improvised, but all are treated with reverence. “Every material carries its own past.”

Her studio isn’t stocked with sterile rolls of new fabric, it’s piled with deadstock: scarred cottons, previously loved lace, misprinted jerseys. To others, they’re discarded. To Kinney, they’re resurrection material. Sustainability is not branding here, it’s ritual.

“These fabrics have already had a life. I want to give them another.”

For Kinney, craft isn’t quaint, it’s erotic. It’s political. It’s survival.

“I think craft is a dying art,” she says plainly. “But it’s also the most intimate form of art. There’s something so intimate and sexy about it”

Every stitch, pull, cast and warp is a gesture of connection, to history, to bodies, to future wearers. She refuses the speed of fast fashion not out of nostalgia, but out of respect.

Image @earl_sweatshirt

At the heart of Progeny is womanhood, not stylised femininity, but lived experience. The collection honours the matriarchs who shaped her: the women of her Indian and Irish bloodlines who weathered, who mended, who passed things down not through speeches but through gesture and graft. Lace trims like her grandmother’s curtains. Weather-worn linens that feel like summers drying on Belfast washing lines.

She doesn’t copy their clothes. She translates their resilience. A dropped stitch isn’t a flaw, it’s softness held in tension. Fragility without submission.

And while Progeny is deeply personal, Kinney refuses to treat her practice as solitary.

“The practice is always grounded in community,” she says. Whether working with knitters, sourcing second-hand lace from aunties, swapping techniques across cultures, or dressing fellow designers, her garments are passed from hand to hand before they touch a runway.

Though emotionally rooted in Belfast, Kinney’s creative language has been sharpened in Glasgow, where she studied at GSA. “Glasgow has this brilliant balance, and raw but deeply generous. There’s no pressure to perform. People let you try, fail, work slower. They’re patient.”

That patience is essential to her slow making ethos. Some garments take weeks, even months, of building, unpicking, and rebuilding before she lets them live on a body. “Clothing shouldn’t be disposable. It should be intimate enough to grieve if lost.”

Soon, her journey expands again. This year, she’ll travel to India for four months, beginning what a sourcing pilgrimage; meeting artisans, gathering textiles, learning techniques at their origin rather than through second-hand interpretation.

Progeny may be a graduate collection, but it already feels like the first chapter of a lifelong manifesto. Kinney isn’t chasing virality or trend cycles. She is building a living archive, one garment at a time. Having already appeared showcased a piece for the “Irish Sea theme” on the runway at Ireland Fashion Week, Kinney is well on her way to success.

In her world, fashion isn’t spectacle; it’s continuity. A body carrying its past forward. A lineage worn like armour, like blessing, like skin.

image Ireland Fashion Week by Yami Pavia