This same bravery and sense of uninhibited fervor goes for everything Irina does. She turned her passion for beat poetry and rhythmic literature into songs with the help of Pete Doherty when she collaborated with the Libertines at fourteen years old and today, among many other projects, she is designing her own line of clothes based on what she feels is a need for the quintessential women’s three-piece suit and she is jamming on stage with Sean Lennon and others with her new endeavor, Operation Juliet. Irina refers to her successes as “improvising,” but her talent and honesty are real and never more apparent than in her iconic sense of style.
Karl Lagerfeld’s excitement for the artists and muses of past centuries taught Irina most of what she knows about where to look for influence as a designer. But for me, Irina is of that stature herself with her eclectic doe-eyed androgyny. She not only wears a tie with a button-down shirt and glen plaid blazer à la Diane Keaton, but takes it to a level of hyper-diversity with jodphurs, a leather corset belt and a Greta Garbo-like hat. She rocks the masculinity of Katherine Hepburn in oversized Balenciaga palazzo pants, but with with the delicacy of a ’20s cloche hat and a checked vintage blazer. Following in the footsteps of her writer activist father and grandfather in an authentic military blazer over an Ossie Clarke dress, Irina thinks for herself. This is epitomized by her sense of outrage when someone criticized her in an article for not being afraid to wear the same thing twice: “the most ridiculous line ever written…I don’t know anybody who doesn’t wear the same thing twice.” When you have a soulful connection to everything in life, including your clothing, it’s not disposable.
