By Saoirse MacCarthy
Booda is redefining knitwear for a new generation, born from Romanian dressmaking culture and a deep commitment to sustainability. Founder Anna Buda is building an ethical brand that challenges fast fashion while reimagining Ireland’s textile future, inspired by Ireland’s past.
Knitwear rarely conjures images of summer silhouettes, bikinis and backless dresses and a twenty-something founder determined to be faithful to Ireland’s textile Industry. Booda was not created to be boring, “Not Your Granny’s Knitwear,” reads the brand’s tagline. A playful rejection of the beige, shapeless stereotype often attached to wool and sustainable fashion.
Clothing has always been personal for Anna. Raised in a Romanian household where dresses are custom-made, she grew up with a fascination with dressmakers, until she was exposed to the fashion world and realised it had limitless opportunities. “I loved the dressmakers. I wanted more to be a dressmaker than a fashion designer, but then I got a phone. I started seeing all these fashion shows, and I was like, oh no, I want to do that.” The idea that clothing could be created specifically for you, cared for, shaped her understanding of what fashion should be long before social media opened the door to the wider industry. What began as an admiration for craftsmanship evolved into something more ambitious: a desire to start her own label. A label rooted in slow fashion, more deliberate, and far more resistant to waste.
Attending Griffith College and receiving a Bachelor’s in Fashion Design, Anna went on a journey while discovering the textile medium she wanted to commit to. Originally, Anna created a collection using leather, but research into fabric waste brought on the “full 180 from a sturdy leather to a soft knit.” Synthetics never appealed to Anna, because “a big thing also was plastics because there is a big problem with microplastics and then all the fabric waste going into the landfills.” Wool was a natural decision for her, a textile with minimum waste and environmental impact, in all elements of production, processing and manufacturing of the garment.
It is important to Anna that she produce clothes that she would wear herself, nothing too “Grannyish.” “I have a big problem with mass-produced clothing,” She recognised that young women tend to wear fast fashion, which is trendy but devastating to the environment. “I just wanted to find a solution for girls our age to find, not even that it’s homemade, that it’s just ethically made clothing that is still stylish, that is still for the girls.”
Anna’s next step is to produce clothes for young men in her next collection. “I never even thought of men, and then all my male friends, they were just like, Anna, this is great, please, please make something for us. “She is planning classic masculine silhouettes, muscle t-shirts reimagined for a youthful fashion-forward male audience.
A challenge while creating a sustainable clothing brand will always be affordability, let alone when the clothing is made for a young audience. Anna knows she competes with fast fashion, which can churn out cheap plastic clothing like there is no tomorrow. Currently, the wool used to create Booda is a silk and merino wool blend, hand-dyed by Wild Atlantic Yarns. The Donegal-based company sources their textiles from the UK. Anna is searching for a 100% alternative within her budget. “That was my main goal, just to find, not a balance, just clothes for us that are still ethically made. I am like trying to find how to make it cheaper now, because obviously this demographic does not have the most amount of money.” Anna’s focus is that the clothing production is ethical, from start to finish, not a typical concern for companies with a young audience.
Currently, Anna is saving to upgrade her knitting machines, which will make it so she can produce a garment faster. Therefore, making the item cheaper for her consumer, but she is not planning to increase the amount of clothing she is creating. “I hope to God someone does not just wear that and throw it out because that took me a long time. It took me some time. It is like all the love that goes into it, then, you want the love to be received.” The collections will continue to be made in small batches, so that people can fall in love with the garment and not overconsume.
Anna’s vision for Booda’s future is heavily inspired by Ireland’s past: “the long-term goal of Booda, I want to start up a little wool processing facility as well when I can get that money up so that literally everything is made here.” She is passionate about Ireland’s woollen history: “You could get your clothes made here, worn here, fabric made here, everything was made here.” She recognised that the industry has now completely changed, few woollen mills remain operational, and it is financially impossible for farmers to survive selling only wool. It now costs farmers more to shear the sheep than the amount of money they make on a bag of wool. Anna and her friend Raf are producing a documentary about the decline of the Irish textile Industry, which was all heritage skills, including lace production, and how manufacturing can start up once again in Ireland. Years ago, manufacturing left Ireland and moved abroad, “it’s really just getting passed on to a big corporation that they’ll make the clothes for you, but they’ll make them really bad, and they’ll make them using child or slave labour, and everything is polyester.” Anna emphasized, the clothing industry needs to get “back to a bit more natural, getting back to smaller, more ethical means of production.”
For Anna Buda, Booda is not just about knitwear, but restoring the care to the way clothing is made and worn. As she is working towards building a completely Iris-based production model with ethical production at its core. Creating thoughtful collections with intention over mass producing excess garments. “I do not want to make something that will be trendy today and then they will throw it out tomorrow because my materials are long-lasting, they are high quality,” she says, emphasising the longevity built into her materials and process. As designers feel pressure to produce with speed, Booda deliberately moves slowly. Proving that knitwear, when shaped by heritage, ethics and a sharp vision, can be completely reimagined for the next generation.
Booda can be found on Instagram @booda.ie