WILD GEESE:Fiona Leahy, Founder of Fiona Leahy Design (London)

FIONA LEAHY knows how to party. From organising the Goth-meets-Victoriana wedding of Marilyn Manson and burlesque star Dita Von Teese to styling bijoux lunches for London’s fashion set, this convent girl has come a long way from her native Tipperary.

When the rich and famous want to celebrate, it is to Leahy’s eponymously titled creative agency they turn. Leahy has styled events for brands Harvey Nichols and Louis Vuitton, Russian oil heiresses and Middle Eastern royalty, and it is her creativity that is the unique selling point of her London-based business. “I think it really helped growing up in a small place. I was just obsessed with art and creativity and didn’t have much else to do,” says the Cashel native.

Though “not academic in any way shape or form”, Leahy began an arts degree at UCG. After two weeks of lectures came the epiphany that fashion was her calling and she hightailed it to Dublin, where she took up evening classes at the Grafton Academy.

An impulsive decision made at a party resulted in Leahy hitting New York aged 21, and the city’s wider canvas was a liberation.

“In Ireland, you know, sometimes when I was growing up it just seemed like the land of impossibility in some ways,” she says. “It was just a big release to get out of rural Ireland and then all of a sudden to be in New York where there was every possibility of doing anything you wanted.”

Juggling waitressing with a job in a clothes store, Leahy started designing clothes. Then a customer suggested she try her hand at fashion shows. Soon she found herself assisting legendary catwalk show producer Kevin Krier and working with Patti Wilson, the American editor of I.D. magazine, on shoots with photographers Terry Richardson and David LaChapelle. “It was a great start,” says Leahy.

But two years in, she was jaded. “I thought, fashion’s great, but I just couldn’t be on another shoot thinking about the skirt length on a 14-year-old Russian model. It just wasn’t inspiring enough.”

Before quitting New York for London, Leahy bailed out of styling a Calvin Klein photo shoot. “I thought, I don’t want to spend the weekend ironing jeans, I’ll give it [the job] to my friend.”

The model on the shoot turned out to be Kate Moss, who hired Leahy’s friend as her assistant.

Moving to London, Leahy’s good deed was rewarded when her friend arranged an introduction to Moss’s friend, jewellery designer Jade Jagger.

The pair hit it off and, when Jagger was appointed creative director of Garrard, the crown jewellers, Leahy followed.

Becoming assistant creative director, Leahy designed everything from jewellery collections to window displays, but it was organising promotional parties that really captured her imagination.

“It was really immediate, instead of a piece of jewellery which took months to design.”

Leaving Garrard, Leahy was approached by Louis Vuitton for whom she designed some fine jewellery collections. But it was in hiring burlesque artist Dita Von Teese for an event that her career took another serendipitous turn.

Becoming friends with Von Teese, who was engaged to rock icon Marilyn Manson, Leahy was asked to design their wedding.

“I was thinking, oh my God, I’ve never done anything like this. It’s one thing doing something in a store but, you know, I just felt so inspired,” she says.

The venue was the castle of an artist friend of the couple – in Tipperary. “It was kind of bizarre,” says Leahy. “This place I had grown up in and run away from, and then all of a sudden I was doing this elaborate crazy wedding there.”

Leahy says the wedding that was to launch her event business “was quite classical, very opulent, really beautiful and sort of Victorian”.

Using “as many Irish things as we could”, Leahy’s event featured custom-woven Irish linen tablecloths and napkins, black and ruby Waterford Crystal goblets, and 4,000 blood-red roses.

Though the wedding was given spreads in American Vogueand the Sunday Times, Leahy jokes that her father was less impressed. "My Dad was like, 'So you're bringing the freak show back to Tipperary?'"

Leahy’s phone has been hopping since. She has designed events for the royal family of Doha, designer Stella McCartney and champagne house Dom Pérignon, and this week she is in Montenegro planning the 40th birthday of billionaire Nat Rothschild, scion of the world’s most famous banking family.

But what does Leahy do when a client with more money than taste wants her to do something, well, naff? “Luckily it hasn’t happened. I think when people come to me, they know I’ve got such a definite style.”

It seems that it is more muse than money that spurs her on. “I do turn down work but it’s usually not a budget thing, it’s more where I can’t really add any value. If something’s very corporate and not very creative and it’s not really my area, then I will turn things down.”

So has partying been hit by the recession? “In luxury goods there’s an insulation in some ways,” she says. “The only thing is that people may not want to be as showy, but people always have to entertain, they have to have parties.”

Leahy is appreciative of her success. “I thought by not going to college and not knowing what I wanted to do that I was actually a bit of a failure,” she says. “But as soon as you let all of that go and just go out into the world and see all the things you’re interested in, it shows you can actually be successful without having to go through the regular channels.”

Fiona Leahy

Founder of Fiona Leahy Design (London)