When a young fashion designer refers to his workspace as “the dungeon”, you know you’re in for a good conversation. And by ‘dungeon’, he means his family basement.
This is a story about someone at the very beginning.
Isaac Fenech is 23, works alone, and hasn’t slept at a normal hour since roughly 2019. Last summer, he debuted his first full 12-look collection at Malta Fashion Week. This year, he’s returning. In between, he’s been doing what most people at the dawn of their careers do: work obsessively, sleep at unholy hours, and focus their entire energy on improving a single skill that will one day, in retrospect, look like a leap.
Fashion, Fenech will tell you, occupies a strange position. “It’s not quite art, because it’s too technical, but it’s also not NOT an art.” What really interests me is where Fenech sees himself falling on that spectrum.
His pieces — beautifully structured corsets, figure-flattering bias-cut silk dresses — look like something lifted from a painting.
By his own description, they’re “sculptural and romantic garments meant to delight you for decades.” He means the ‘decades’ part literally. Longevity is a guiding principle in his design process: If it can’t be cleaned, cared for, and repaired, he doesn’t want to make it. He recently retired one of his signature corset constructions for this very reason — six fused layers, technically stunning, but difficult to maintain.
When we discuss couture itself, he stresses the importance of garments having a solid structural foundation. “The really fascinating part [of couture garments] is what’s underneath,” he says. “People don’t realise that while the texture, lace and beading is stunning and captivating, that’s not the bulk of the work. That’s just the glaze on top.”
Where another designer might dazzle with embellishment, Fenech wants people to appreciate the architecture of his pieces. But he’s not going to call himself a couturier just yet. “I think ten years is the sweet spot.” It’s a precise read of where he is on a long road — a refusal to overclaim before he’s earned it. Each piece also serves as a template: Clients can come to his made-to-measure catalogue and project their own vision — fabric, colour, finish — onto the design.
He’s been doing this for seven years, which is quite the track record when you’re 23. A Fashion Design degree from MCAST, time as an alterations assistant, and a few years working for a well-known local designer have given him real workroom experience and sharpened his technical fluency. “When you’re working alone,” he says, “the technical aspect is the most important thing, because without it, you can’t do anything.”
His advice to anyone learning how to sew: Pick one garment, and make it twenty times. “Once you’ve made twenty of them, stuff starts to click.” It’s not glamorous. It could involve cutting pieces of metal boning and hand-stitching through several layers of fabric, hundreds of times. “Hopefully you haven’t bled on the actual dress,” he says dryly, “which happens more often than you think.”
There’s a common misconception that custom dressmaking is lucrative — it isn’t, and Fenech has no illusions about that. “I’d rather be proud of my work than have the money.” The craft is the point.
This is what the beginning looks like from the inside: It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s a grind. For now, it’s a basement in Malta, and from that basement, a designer is becoming himself.
