The awardwinning multidisciplinary artist draws inspiration and creative energy from her childhood memories, horses, music and – most recently – flowers Margaret O'Connor DJing at her Avant Garda show. Photograph: Sebastian Szuster Sun Aug 02 2026 - 05:59 • 4 MIN READMargaret O’Connor knows how to make heads turn. Her hats have attitude. If millinery is an expression of freedom (according to hatmaker extraordinaire Stephen Jones), her creativity knows no bounds. With the Galway Races on all last week and more racing fixtures throughout August, there are those out for the flutter or the feathers, and her hats and headbands are everywhere. An awardwinning multidisciplinary artist with a fiery and fearless spirit, and who trained with Philip Treacy, O’Connor isn’t just a milliner – she’s a popular DJ too. Her Beta Blockers and 14 Avant Garda dancers most recently performed at the Doolin Folkfest and will be appearing again this weekend at the All Together Now music festival in Waterford. O’Connor is also known for her jewellery – her Deadly, Rebel, Ride, Savage and Notions necklaces have been widely copied – as well as handbags and even interiors. She has stronger connections to the equestrian world than most milliners as her father has about 30 horses. She grew up with her two sisters and five brothers in the heart of the Burren, in Boston, Co Clare, attending shows in Ballinasloe and at Spancil Hill International Horse Fair, Ireland’s oldest.Margaret O'Connor DJing at her Avant Garda show. Photograph: Sebastian Szuster Margaret O'Connor and her Avant Garda dancers. Photograph: Sebastian Szuster Her latest collection, Easily Led, is informed by this background, with signature crowns, scarves, hats and accessories. “The horses were energy, movement, power, instinct – part of my everyday world. And this is the year of the horse, and the horse is my favourite animal. That energy runs through my collection,” O’Connor says. Another headpiece, The Mighty Quinn – which she wore recently to Cheltenham with a tweed dress and vintage leather coat – is a tribute to the late Mark Quinn of Corofin, an influential entrepreneur who founded the Só Collective at Kildare Village championing Irish design. After a series of friends’ deaths, O’Connor created a beautiful mourning collection of headpieces called Forget Me Not, reviving the tradition of wearing a hat for a funeral.Most recently she was in the news for creating a chapeau for the writer Maggie O’Farrell. “It was a challenge. I dropped everything. How do you get into the mindset of a writer? I got a few quills and made a headband with a quill which she wore to the Baftas.” O’Farrell, a big fan of O’Connor’s turbans, also wore a net birdcage headband for the Oscars. “It made my day,” O’Connor says. Kate, €395, from Margaret O'Connor's mourning series. Photograph: Colm Hogan Showstopper Quality Treat, €750. Photograph: Colm Hogan Neon Lights headband, €450. Photograph: Colm Hogan Wild Cat Fez, €295. Photograph: Colm Hogan O’Connor is well used to celebrity fans like Kate Moss, Debbie Harry and Lady Gaga, and is proud of the fact that one of her hats was selected for display in the National Gallery of Ireland.She cuts quite an entrance when we meet for a coffee in Dublin before her return home to the west, where she lives in a 1920s farmhouse in Gort with her black cat, Caravaggio. Dressed in a shapely leopard-print sheath décolleté, she wears a sumptuous red velvet rosette hairband called Champion (a popular style that comes in various fabrics and colours) matching her bright red lipstick. The hairband is inspired by childhood memories of her father bringing home rosettes from horse show wins. “A contemporary take on a familiar item – I was always obsessed with my father coming home with rosettes,” she says.She talks about how she laughed the whole way through the Odysseus movie (“all those wicked women!”), and met actor and presenter Siobhán McSweeney afterwards – another fan, who wore one of her necklaces in The Traitors. Music means a lot to her – a love inherited from her mother, Marion – and she argues that it goes hand in hand with art. A lot of artists have been DJs, she says, citing performers like Australian Leigh Bowery and US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat who was famous for the quote, “Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.” “Music is connected to freedom, escapism,” O’Connor says. “I research new music to make new pathways in my brain, so you are in a space when you are creating something and nothing else. I am always going to gigs chasing the things that activate my creativity.” Dahlia Sky Blue, €210. Photograph: Gary Collins Cloud Bursting, €550. Photograph: Gary Collins Lady Godiva, €450. Photograph: Gary Collins She points out that Stephen Jones also worked with musicians. “Like him, I am more of a punk in the stuff that I play – I’m eclectic in my choices.”Still passionate about making hats, she has collaborated with chef Jess Murphy of Kai in Galway pairing hats to cakes, worked with visual artist Aideen Barry for Barry’s artwork Oblivion, and in a first for an Irish fashion designer, won the Global Original Fashion Design Award in Guangzhou at China International Fashion Week. “I think outside the box and I am a free spirit. I think it is important in life to surround yourself with good people,” she says. Polaroid camera at the ready, she shows me a picture of herself dressed in what she calls her Cloud Nine blue and white trouser suit, complete with her new Dahlia headband – her latest interest is in flowers. “I am obsessed with flowers and grew up with my mother’s wonderful garden,” she says. O’Connor and her sister attended Bloom this year and some of her newer pieces were inspired by that visit. “At the moment I am creating some of my best work,” she says. “All I want to do is to make stuff that I really like making.”IN THIS SECTION