It’s a dark, damp, gloomy evening, and I’m huddled outside Dublin Airport with my dance friends, unable to stop chatting about Irish dance. I’m dreading trying to wrangle a broken, bursting, 90-pound suitcase through the terminal. The suitcase is held together with an old belt, a prayer, and a lot of good vibes. I’ve never set eyes on the 20 vintage Irish dancing dresses that have been painstakingly packed inside, and we can’t open the suitcase to peek, because we know it won’t close again.
The dresses are a gift from my friend Jessica Lagreid, founder of Make It Feision, the one-woman upcycled Irish dancing enterprise creating one-of-a-kind treasures from vintage Irish dance costumes. Make It Feision was founded in 2021 in Jessica’s Seattle apartment. She has been taking embroidered pieces of “out of style” dresses and adding them as embellishments to upcycled apparel, accessories, and home decor.
If it’s a custom piece you’re after, made from a dress you or someone you loved wore at one point, Jessica works closely with customers to understand the story behind the costume and create something you can continue to enjoy today.
Jessica’s professional background is in sustainability, and she’s been constantly driven by the question of: “What happens with all this physical stuff?”
“Just seeing all this physical stuff that’s in our lives and in the market, it feels like there is so, so much stuff in the world,” she says. “It’s mainly sold because it can be sold to people, not because people actually need it. I was interested in what we do with all this stuff, all this waste?”
Jessica started her career working in waste management in the States, consulting on waste and recycling streams for four years, and also spent time working in compost and food waste prevention. She’d always been interested in textiles, though, and in 2023 that interest brought her to Ireland to pursue postgraduate study in sustainability, closer to the European Union’s more progressive sustainable textile work. Her professional career, coupled with Jessica’s deep nostalgia for the dresses of decades gone, was the catalyst for Make It Feision.
“Seeing all this physical stuff that’s in our lives and in the market, it feels like there is so, so much stuff in the world”
Jessica Lagreid
Jessica, who has been dancing for 30 years, started her dance journey with Deely Smith School of Irish Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area. Seeing photographs from a major competition in the early 2000s, she thought to herself, “Where are all those dresses now? What happened to them?
“If you think about a major competition, where there are thousands of dancers across age groups…that’s thousands of dresses. They are not only a significant financial investment — it’s time, energy, and work that goes into making them,” she explains. “And it’s not like you can just sell them into the general population; it’s a really niche and narrow buying audience for them after a dancer is done with them. And for many, they have emotional attachment and significance. You hang on to them because they have intrinsic value.’
Jessica couldn’t let go of the idea that there were thousands of dresses languishing in attics and basements and under beds, only surfacing during a clear-out.
She remembers briefly telling her sister about her burgeoning idea on a road trip. “After that trip, my sister kept saying, ‘You’re not going to believe what I got you for Christmas.’ I opened this giant box, and there were these three dresses she had found on eBay and Poshmark. And she said, ‘Here, you can start playing with this idea.’”
“When I took scissors to that first dress, my heart was in my throat,” Jessica remembers. “But the alternative is this dress is in a basement or being tossed around a charity shop, or being in the back of the closet where it doesn’t mean anything anymore, or worse, gets thrown away. This is giving it meaning again, which I think is a better outcome.”
As the business grew, Jessica started working on custom pieces with dresses that did still mean something to dancers, which added new meaning to her work.
One of the most interesting projects Jessica has worked on was Irish dance teacher Ciara Sexton’s first solo dress. Jessica reworked the original dress into a statement bow, shoulder capelet, clutch handbag, and shoe clips.
“She’s a complete icon and true leader in the world of Irish dance,” Jessica remembers. “It was really fun because she’s so creative and has a wonderful sense of her own style. This dress was the start of her illustrious Irish dancing journey, and for her it holds so much meaning around the people who have supported her along the way,” she says.
Ciara speaks highly of the experience of having her dress transformed by Jessica. “She brought the pieces to life as wonderful tributes so I could celebrate my very cherished memories as a young competitor whilst making new memories with my new dancers in my forever home, Ireland,’ she shared.
“The story, the meaning, the colours, the designs, and the craftsmanship can still be enjoyed and cherished”
Jessica Lagreid
And then there are other times when Jessica holds onto a donated dress, or a set of dresses, because “there might be people who want to put them onstage and on smiling bouncing kiddos, and they get to be danced in again.”
Which is how we got to be standing here, with a suitcase of 20 dresses, in the Dublin drizzle.
A retired Irish dancing teacher in Ireland contacted Jessica when she lived in the States, looking to donate dresses. Jessica couldn’t take them then, but reached back out after moving to Dublin. Jessica spent an afternoon learning about the dresses and this teacher’s dancing journey over a cup of tea, and left the house with three giant suitcases.
“Not only did she have these dresses, she’d made some herself and taught many of the parents to embroider,” Jessica remembers.
I run a small, non-competitive dance school. When I was over in Ireland for a dance workshop, I had asked Jessica if she had any used dresses, thinking she might have one or two to lend my more advanced students. She had been waiting for the opportunity to re-home this set of school dresses. Without question, she packed them into a suitcase and sent them home with me. “Lo and behold, just in my circle there was the perfect scenario,” she recalls.
To end the suspense: the suitcase made it home without bursting. And, without any planning on our part, every child in my school found a dress that fit, and they wore them in our St Patrick’s Day performance.
“I think the [previous] teacher who donated will be thrilled to know that this piece of her history is going across the world to be danced again,” Jessica says.
“There is nothing else like it. Dancing in those dresses is special and unique”
Jessica Lagreid
Jessica knows firsthand the thrill of your first real Irish dance dress.
“You think back to that first chance to wear a dress; I was about seven years old, I think. Those first times, you’re just beaming,” she says. “There is nothing else like it. Dancing in those dresses is special and unique. It’s so, so joyful to see a new group of people being able to experience that.”
Jessica has no intention of massive business growth or intense scale. Instead, she’s interested in preserving the stories, the histories, the intricate designs, and the communal nature that makes Irish dance so special while encouraging creative thinking around how we use and experience textiles.
“There is so much love and work that went into them, and maybe they aren’t as desirable as they were, but there is still incredible potential for them. The story, the meaning, the colours, the designs, and the craftsmanship can still be enjoyed and cherished. Especially when we are increasingly surrounded by stuff that was made with very little intention, without story, without meaning — stuff that was just mass-produced for the sake of selling and generating profits,” Jessica says.
Watching a group of dancers light up when they got to put these handmade, vintage dresses on was something a mass-produced garment just won’t be able to do. Watching them trace the embroidery, wonder who made it, and discuss how many people may have worn the dress before them — that is the power and the story of Irish dance. Make It Feision is bringing those stories back to life.
Follow Make It Feision on Instagram and find more information on makeitfeision.com.
