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Sybil Connolly

1921–1998

 

For nearly her whole life, Sybil Connolly was synonymous with Irish high fashion, a genre she could be said to have invented.  Irish people of fashion had been accustomed to follow the lead of Paris and London.  A la mode meant designs and fabrics conceived and created abroad.  She changed that.

      Connolly was brought up in Wales with two sisters.  As a young girl, she was taken by her mother to see Balenciaga, and this made a great impression on her.  Educated at the Convent of Mercy at Waterford, she joined Bradleys in London as an apprentice at the age of eighteen, where she studied design.  Almost forgotten now, the firm was one of the big names between the wars in London, and employed some fifty apprentices.  The ninety-eight fitting rooms were always busy with fashionable customers, and once or twice she was even sent to Buckingham Palace to assist in royal fittings for the imposing Queen Mary.

      At the outbreak of the war, in 1940, she was persuaded by her family to return to live in Dublin.  There she brought her London experience to Richard Alan, a leading Dublin shop then owned by Jack Clarke, of which she became a director in 1943.  The firm specialized in tweedy country wear, stylish but far from high fashion.  The owner of the firm gave her the opportunity to design her own dress line in 1952.  One dress, called Bal Masque, created a stir.  She then established her own firm in 1953.

      Success on an international scale followed.  Three dresses from the first show went to New York to be shown in an international show which included the likes of Dior, Jacques Fath, and Hardy Amies.  She held a fashion show at Dunsany Castle (the ancient home of the Plunketts) for American buyers and fashion writers.  Sheila, Lady Dunsany, was among her first clients, and when she visited the United States with her husband Lord Dunsany, she wore clothes designed by Sybil Connolly.  This collection crossed the Atlantic and was shown in 'The World of Fashion' exhibition in Boston along with gowns from other great European couturiers such as Schiaparelli, Patou, and Fath.  She was on the cover of Life magazine, with five pages featuring her inside.

      Gabrielle Williams, long-time fashion correspondent of the Irish Times, records that her first shows received immediate and wild enthusiasm.  'She had done the unthinkable: transforming the clothing of the Irish peasant into haute couture, using traditional Irish fabrics throughout.  It had never been done before.'

      Orders soon followed from the United States, which she often visited.  There she met her great friend, the doyenne of the American fashion world, Eleanor Lambert.  She also made many visits to Australia.

      It was not merely her flair for line and colour, but her desire to use Irish fabrics, light tweeds, linens, and lace woollen fabrics of other kinds that made her work distinctive.  From the beginning her work was distinctive and unmistakable.

      She was, it must be admitted, lucky in her connections, for she managed to establish herself with Bergdofs in New York, and it was her clientele in the United States that made her famous worldwide, with features on her work in Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Time and other magazines.  She made dresses for Jacqueline Kennedy and other society hostesses in New York, Boston and San Francisco.  Mrs Kennedy was painted wearing a Sybil Connolly dress for her White House portrait.

      Miss Connolly diversified her range of designs, moving in fabrics and interiors, becoming in due course a designer for Tiffanys in New York of china, pottery, and crystal, all made by Irish craftspeople.  Watercolours of floral subjects were converted into chintzes for Brunschwig and Fils and bed linens for Martex.  She became a popular lecturer in North America, and wrote two books, In an Irish Garden (of which she was co-author) and In an Irish House.  From time to time she served on various committees involved with the arts, yet at home she lived quietly enough, as her imagination and energy was concentrated on the American market rather than the Irish social scene.

      However, she remained clearly identified with Ireland.  Her own magnificent home in Dublin's famous Georgian area, Merrion Square, made an elegant showroom for her creations, and for several decades this was her base, where her clients could view her creations, come for advice and also buy antiques or other items of Irish design.

      Her most influential years were the critical ones of the late 1950s and 1960s.  Today, when fashion has broken out of its old rigid moulds, Sybil Connolly can be seen as a figure who united the best of both approaches.  Her clothes were lovely in an elegant, classical way, but they were also bold and often daring in the choice of materials and colours.  She brought Ireland as a fashion centre into the consciousness of the world, and so opened the way for two generations of other Irish designers who have followed her, such as Irene Gilbert, Paul Costelloe, John Rocha and Louise Kennedy.

      There was a deep irony here, in that she based her most successful designs on the clothes and fabrics of the rural Irish, whom poverty had driven out to America.  Yet in her hands they became romantic, charming, and beautiful.