9-5: How Maria McManus Layers Feminine Staples With Sharp Tailoring

Reported by Vogue.

Maria McManus has never been interested in fashion as performance. The Irish-born, New York-based designer — whose label is built on sustainable, season-agnostic dressing — approaches her own wardrobe the same way she approaches her work: with intention, restraint, and enough subversion to keep things interesting. According to Vogue, McManus breaks down a full week of summer-in-the-city looks from her Tribeca apartment, and the throughline is clear: quality materials, layered silhouettes, and a refined palette that refuses to be boring.

Her daily uniform leans on what she calls "two or three-piece dressing" — the kind of modular thinking that lets her build an outfit the way a designer thinks in collections. Tailoring anchors almost every look: blazers worn with sleeves scrunched to the elbow, pencil skirts with exposed zippers, barrel-leg corduroys balanced by a long tunic for what she describes as a "long, lean" proportion. She tucks or doesn't tuck based entirely on whether the waistband is worth showing off. There are no rules, just decisions. The accessories rotate minimally — Sherman Fields bracelets, a vintage Art Deco tiger's eye ring, the occasional Charlotte Chesnais cuff — because she "pretty much wears the same jewelry every day."

The Material Is the Message

Five years into running her brand, McManus can identify the fiber composition of anything she's ever designed — or currently wearing. The navy cashmere-cotton sweater on her Zoom call? Recycled cashmere blended with organic cotton, from an Italian mill. Her leggings? Made from biodegradable fruit polymers, not polyester. She builds her personal wardrobe almost entirely from organic wool, silk, satin, and cotton, occasionally letting "little hints of lace or macramé" disrupt the minimalism. Even her iteration of the trench coat — a wardrobe cornerstone she returns to repeatedly — comes lined in stripes, styled with a graphic silk scarf and leggings that can dress up or down depending on whether she's in heels or flip-flops.

What makes McManus compelling as a style subject isn't just that she wears her own clothes — it's that she wears them like someone who actually understands construction. A sheer asymmetric skirt gets paired with a pinstripe button-down and a cropped corduroy jacket for dinner; the same outfit, she notes, works just as easily for a showroom meeting with clients. A champagne opera scarf in sateen with a hand-crocheted macramé finish transforms a basic button-down-and-black-skirt combination into something editorial. The femininity in her work is always present, always slightly recut.

She splits her time between Manhattan, Montauk, and Ireland, which means her wardrobe has to move as efficiently as she does — and it does, because she built it that way. When your clothes are this considered, getting dressed stops being a question and starts being a practice.

Read the original at Vogue.