Although a number of Irish designers now show their ready-to-wear collections in Paris, it has been almost half a century since anyone associated with this State featured during the haute couture season. Yesterday evening, Dubliner Peter O'Brien, who has lived in Paris for the past two decades, entered the select band of names - today barely 20 - who still stage couture shows.
This is an enclave of fashion which has little association with the mass market. Advocates of haute couture like to claim that it is the crucible of design in which new ideas can be tested before they are offered to the wider market of ready-to-wear. However, as O'Brien's show in the Irish Embassy made plain, such protestations are irrelevant; couture is fantasy translated into a flurry of tulle and silk crepe, the finished article then lavishly hand-beaded and embroidered until barely a square centimetre of fabric is left unadorned. This, at least, is traditional haute couture and it has always been in tradition that O'Brien finds his inspiration.
Yesterday's collection of just 30 ensembles were indebted to Lady Lavery and certainly she, a woman who adored and adorned beautiful clothes all her life, would have been more than happy to have worn these.
In particular, she would have relished the designer's preferred silhouette, in which the upper body is kept long and lean above billowing full skirts. O'Brien's evening wear - and practically every item here was designed to be seen only after nightfall - owes something to the Edwardian era and something to the post-war years of Jacques Fath and Balenciaga. The latter designer, for example, was evoked at the end of the show in luscious opera coats of double satin and taffeta which fell to the ground in a mass of heavy folds.
Before the close, when O'Brien declared himself "tired but happy", there came a series of pieces in which references to Ireland and France were inter-woven. Sometimes the Irish presence was explicit as, with a recording of T.P. McKenna reciting Yeats and music by The Dubliners on the soundtrack, but elsewhere it was more oblique. An example was a high-waisted ball skirt made of tweed from Magee's of Donegal worn with a shirt in bottle green sheer silk chiffon. A belted hacking jacket also came in bejewelled tweed and was thrown over an evening dress in green chiffon.
The latter fabric is a long-time favourite of O'Brien and was used repeatedly - for a chocolate-coloured dress with tiered skirts falling from a dropped waistline or for another evening dress made in dainty mille feuille layers of the material. The outfit with which O'Brien was most happy also found a lot of favour with the show's audience: a pearl-grey silk trenchcoat gathered into a bustle at the rear and shown with a sleeveless polo-neck dress in burgundy silk velvet.
Other items which garnered applause included a black silk crepe kimono coat, its ivory lining densely embroidered with jet beads, and a backless pistachio-coloured silk crepe jumpsuit with navy and pistachio coat. Given the cost of staging such a presentation, in which each garment is worth thousands of pounds, applause was absolutely essential.
The most important support yesterday came from the regular haute couture clients who were present, such as New Yorker Nan Kempner and the Lebanese Mouna Ayoub. If their enthusiasm turns into orders, O'Brien can look forward to becoming an established presence in the Paris couture calendar.