There’s a thrill to being an early adopter, a cachet earned through association. I like to tell people that I’ve been drinking coconut water for years, that I saw a preview of the hit play Jerusalem before it was reviewed and long before it transferred to the West End, that I knew that Ryan Gosling was going to be a star way back in 2004, before The Notebook, after I saw Murder by Numbers.

I felt that bragging-rights-by-proxy effect again this month when I discovered that designer Danielle Romeril was to be stocked on the luxury retail website Avenue 32 and that her autumn/winter 2013 pieces had been featured on Style.com and in top US magazines, including Elle and Cosmopolitan. I first came across Romeril over a year ago at a boozy party in Dublin when I saw a woman dancing in a white skirt and top with laser-cut detailing and approached her to ask her where she got it. She told me she’d designed the pieces herself.

That outfit was part of Danielle Romeril’s spring/summer 2012 collection, her first for her own label, which she established after leaving her job as a designer for Alberta Ferretti. It was a collection of two halves – there were separates with intricate leather and laser-cut detailing, and then there were silk dresses with strong, vibrant graphic patterns – but what it lacked in cohesion, it made up for in bold audacity. These were unusual pieces, the type of design that made you cross the room and approach the wearer with a compliment. 

She showed the collection at the designer showrooms at London Fashion Week in September 2012 and it was warmly received, by retailers in the Middle East and China, and by stylists and editors in Romeril’s native Dublin. Six months later she presented her autumn/winter 2013 collection in London and in Paris, and very quickly it became apparent that this one was going to be even more successful. ‘Immediately I could see the difference,’ Romeril tells me over the phone from Dublin, where her studio is based. ‘Paris is a great location to sell from, we picked up Avenue 32 and a few other stockists. I could tell immediately it was going well. When other designers at trade shows are coming up to you congratulating on your work and telling you how beautiful it is … well, there’s no reason or need for them to do that.’

"You can’t be guided too much by what others have done. They weren’t successful because they copied someone else." - Danielle Romeril

Romeril puts the popularity of her second collection down to the fact that she trusted her own instincts more when designing it. ‘It’s much more me than the summer collection was,’ she says, ‘I was probably still channelling Ferretti for the spring/summer one. With autumn/winter, I wasn’t worrying about customer profile and sales and all the things that you have to worry about when you work for somebody else.’

At Alberta Ferretti – she was scouted for a design job at the Italian label after completing an MA in womenswear at the Royal College of Art in Kensington – Romeril had been ‘doing a lot of draping’ but her own aesthetic is tougher, sleeker, fresher. The autumn/winter collection is inspired by skateboarder culture and features leather, wool and silk pieces that are brilliantly original and utterly wearable all at once. They are the type of clothes that adjust to the wearer, they can look ultra-chic or edgy-street depending on the styling and that is why the label has proven popular with Middle Eastern customers as well as with musicians like Natalia Kills, who has been photographed in the autumn/winter 2013 collection.

Romeril didn’t always know that she was going to design her own line and before Ferretti she had worked with Amanda Wakeley but a chat with a friend made her see what she had to do. ‘I was talking to a friend of mine who works for Margiela and she was asking who I wanted to work with and I said ‘I don’t know’ and the two of us just stared at each other blankly and that’s when I thought, ‘I might need to work for myself.’’

She says she didn’t have role models within the industry – ‘You can’t be guided too much by what others have done. They weren’t successful because they copied someone else; they were successful because they listened to themselves’ – but focused on the practical, getting a studio space, writing a business plan (she dissolves into wild giggles at the memory), creating a strong brand identity. 

And resolutely following her own path has got her where she is now: a designer on the precipice of big things, a woman to watch with interest (her upcoming spring/summer 2014 promises to be just as exciting as last season: ‘It’s inspired by collage and sticky tape and bubble wrap. It’s very girly meets very sporty’), a name you know you’ll be hearing a lot of. Just remember that I told you about her first.   

Danielle Romeril is stocked at Avenue 32