Helen Steele’s latest Dunnes collection has dropped and we’re going to be living in it all winter

Leslie Ann Horgan

On Wednesdays we wear teaberry.

Is it possible that it was January of this year when Helen Steele’s amazing gymwear came into our lives? It feels like we’ve been living in her oversized hoodies, brightly patterned raincoats and butter-soft leggings for our whole lives.

The collection’s AW19 designs were unveiled this week accompanies by the Best News Ever – the first drop hits stores today Saturday September 7, so there’s no tedious wait before we can get our hands on a line that is as easy on the bank balance as it is on the eye.

Monaghan-based artist and designer Helen designed the athleisure range with an ethos of body positivity. The leggings, T-shirts, vests, catsuits, jackets and jumpers come in sizes 8 to 22, and have long lines and high waists meaning they suit every body shape.

While we more often wear our pieces for lolling about than actually going to the gym, if you’re the more active kind Helen assures us that a member of her design team, who is also a triathlete, has tested every garment for performance and comfort.

The pieces feature Helen’s painterly patterns in her signature bright colours, but they’re not just chosen for their aesthetic value. Helen embraces colour therapy when creating her collections, so every shade that she works with is chosen to influence the mood in a particular way.

For this latest collection, she told Her, that she’s chosen colours in a spectrum of “Wizard of Oz-like colour saturation”.

“They are clear colours matched to different parts of the body,” she says of the shades which include a bright yellow and a ‘Hawaiian blue’. And the pink that takes centre stage in the eye catching half-zip jacket is not pink at all but rather ‘teaberry’, which according to Helen is a blend of purple, magenta and red.