DWTS judge Loraine Barry spoke about how she is embracing sustainable luxury fashion and how it's in memory of her late dressmaker Sandra.
Clothes are an important part of Dancing With The Stars - sometimes the fashion choices can be more memorable than the dance moves - yet the choice of clothing can bring more meaning than meets the eye.
Speaking on The Ryan Tubridy show, judge Loraine Barry said her dress was a revamped version of one she wore last season and was in tribute to her former dressmaker Sandra who passed away back in August.
"Dresses are important to me and this season is more important to me because unfortunately, I lost my dressmaker, she passed away in August of last year," she said. "She was from Italy and we worked together for 17 years and was 52 [so] very young."
Barry said she died of a brain hemorrhage and that she will be revamping some of her dresses over the season, both in memory of Sandra and to highlight sustainable luxury.
"I'm using sustainable luxury so that's revamping so the dress [from Sunday] was from last season but revamped," she explained. "I want to do it in memory and I also want to promote very much that we don't have to keep buying, we can use our clothes a little bit more because I believe we are the second-biggest landfill clothing."
Posting a tribute on Instagram, Barry said that clothing can always be "reworked and reused in different areas to create new, fun, up-to-date pieces" and how those clothes lying at the back of your wardrobe could get a new lease of life.
"You look at the back of the wardrobe and that little suit is there or that dress is there and that can be altered," she said to Tubridy. "You can easily change things around and you can see it being done more often now.
"We do it with the dance dresses for the dancers as well so you can use a skirt from before with a different top and use a top with a different skirt, put from a skirt into trousers so it's all doable. It's a very positive thing".
Dancing with the Stars is on Sundays on RTÉ One at 6:30pm, with spin-off show Can't Stop Dancing on Fridays on RTÉ One at 8:30pm.
