One of the great Irish women of this century, Sybil Connolly, is described by her great friend Eleanor Lambert, doyenne of the American fashion industry, as "one of your national treasures - everything she's done has been for the benefit of Irish tradition". The designer has been presented with several honorary degrees and associateships, as well as innumerable awards for her designs. In 1957 she was feted in London as Woman of the Year, while the following autumn in Britain she was voted one of the Top Women Workers. These tributes, and many others, will be recalled on Wednesday when Sybil Connolly is the subject of a half-hour profile on RTE television called Ambassador Of Design.
The designer's rise in the world of Irish fashion was swift and unexpected. Indeed, when she first began to be noticed, the idea of this country having a fashion industry was almost unimaginable. Born in 1921 of an Irish father and Welsh mother, she started her career working for Bradley's, a couture house in London. Very much a junior, she held pins at fittings for Queen Mary and worked on the trousseau of Princess Marina, who married Britain's Duke of Kent.
During the second World War, she moved to Ireland and found a job at Richard Alan, the Dublin clothes shop owned by Jack Clarke. For a number of seasons, Clarke employed a French designer, Gaston Mallet, to produce a collection for sale in Ireland. After Mallet left the company, in 1952, Connolly was given an opportunity to produce her own range. Sheila, Lady Dunsany, who was an early supporter, remembers first meeting her at that time. "I was in Richard Alan's one day and couldn't find a black dress I wanted, so she said: `Why don't I make you one?' I think it was the first thing she made for a client."
Connolly had already been creating clothes for herself; a good figure meant she could display these to excellent advantage. In a 1960 magazine feature, novelist Kate O'Brien recalled seeing her at an evening party in the Gresham Hotel shortly after the war ended. O'Brien described "a figure to impress imagination and memory", clad in a golden-coloured dress and possessed of both "natural elegance" and "total grace". Clearly, Connolly also had plenty of ambition and discipline, because from the start of her professional career she made the most of every opportunity for publicity.
Her first collection for Richard Alan was an enormous success, as were its immediate successors. In July 1953, American fashion buyers and press travelling to Paris were shown her clothes at Dunsany Castle, where the chatelaine laid on a dinner for the occasion. That same year, Connolly brought her collection to the US, where it excited remarkable interest: one of her dresses was featured on the cover of Life, she was profiled in Time, and she appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
At the time only one other Irish designer, the late Irene Gilbert, could claim to have a reputation outside the country.
It was on one of those early visits to the US that Connolly met Eleanor Lambert. "She was a smash hit in America as soon as she arrived and her charm seemed to diffuse all through the country," Lambert remembers. "Everything about her was so glamorous and wonderful. She was almost alone in Irish fashion; she brought over a feeling of it as an entity in itself.
"The following year, my husband and I went to Ireland together and I bought a black shawl for about $10 because she told me it was the essence of Irish style." Connolly very quickly acquired an impressive clientele - including, of course, Lady Dunsany, who says: "When I first knew her I went to America and wore her clothes in Philadelphia and New York. She took a lot of trouble over the fittings and the workmanship was very good. My daughter had a beautiful wedding dress made by her." So too did Lady Melissa Wyndham-Quin when she married Sir George Brooke in 1959. Lady Brooke was already an admirer of Sybil Connolly's designs. "When I came out in the year of the Coronation, Sybil dressed me. She wasn't really known then, and we used to get fitted in a tiny room behind Richard Alan's shop. I remember one beautiful dress - it was strapless and made of white men's linen handkerchiefs banded in white satin. Cecil Beaton photographed me in it but unfortunately I don't have the dress any more; I gave my boyfriends all the handkerchiefs."
Lady Brooke's mother, the late Countess of Dunraven, and her sister Caroline, now Marchioness of Waterford, were also regular Irish customers, together with Lady Beit and Anne, Countess of Rosse. As a designer, Connolly's greatest strength lay in the imaginative redeployment of traditional Irish materials. The most original of all her creations was the pleated-handkerchief linen dress; the first of these to be shown in the US - an evening dress called First Love with more than 5,000 pleats - caused a huge stir and helped to secure her reputation. Nine yards of linen produced a mere one yard of the finished fabric, which was then dyed rich shades and made into uncrushable clothing. The pleated linen is as unique and remarkable as Mario Fortuny's Delphos pleated silk dresses from earlier this century. In 1953, responding to criticism of her work as being too "stage-Irish", she said: "This is a terribly competitive business. Unless Ireland can produce something distinctive, she will get nowhere." Connolly's distinctive approach was to take old forms and give them a fresh twist for the 1950s. She bought red flannel used for petticoats in Connemara, for example, and designed quilted skirts with it, teaming these with white cambric blouses and black shawls of the kind bought by Eleanor Lambert. It was at once highly traditional and yet, thanks to her tailoring, completely contemporary.
Donegal tweeds were also regularly seen in her collections, made up for daywear-suiting in brighter colours than had hitherto been available. And Carrickmacross lace was another old Irish material given a new lease of life. She always liked to emphasise the local inspiration of each piece; a 1954 evening ensemble was called "Man of Aran" and a flecked tweed suit from the same period, "Lough Corrib".
Balenciaga and Dior were two designers with whose work she was obviously familiar. Her collections were never revolutionary in design or cut but owed their appeal principally to clever use of fabric. "Everything she made was extremely elegant," comments designer Pat Crowley, who has long been an admirer of Sybil Connolly. "She dressed her international clientele with great ease and her handling of tweed was unique."
She continued to be a talented, industrious promoter of her own clothes. After gaining a market in the US, at the end of 1954 Connolly took a range of her designs to Australia, where she won fresh accolades.
Dashing from one country to the next, she found new clients everywhere. Members of the Rockefeller and Dupont families regularly bought her clothes, as did Merle Oberon, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. The last of these was painted for her official White House portrait wearing a Sybil Connolly pleated linen dress.
By 1957, Connolly was sufficiently well-established to cut the ties with Richard Alan and set up on her own in Merrion Square, where she still lives. She calls her home "the house that linen built". There, she soon became as famous for her hospitality as for her clothes. "She was a very good hostess," Lady Dunsany recalls. "She took an awful lot of trouble and was always a really warm and generous person." "People of consequence who came to Dublin always managed to meet her and like her," Eleanor Lambert confirms. Connolly's charm is renowned; she has impeccable manners, her voice is soft and low and she evinces enormous interest in whoever she is with. "She always had great style," designer Pat Crowley says. "She moved in the right places and knew everyone. I used to be in awe of her. She had fantastic dedication and drive; she believed in what she was doing and just did it."
Rising very early in the morning, Connolly accomplished more in those first hours than most people would achieve during the rest of the day, but not even her determination and stamina could resist the changes in fashion which took place during the 1960s: her style is firmly set in the decade in which she originally achieved success. Judging by photographs, even her own appearance seems to have become fixed about 45 years ago and barely altered since then.
All around her, however, public taste underwent a seismic shift.
Connolly never displayed great interest in ready-to-wear clothing; from the start, she has been a couturier working with individual clients. The majority of them stayed loyal to her, but she gradually gave up the public shows, preferring to arrange private visits for her customers. Interviewed in 1972, she remarked: "I cannot understand why young people today set out so deliberately to make themselves look so awful." However, Sybil Connolly is nothing if not resourceful. She turned to other interests and discovered alternative outlets for her creative energies. As well as lines of bed-linen for Brunschwig et Fils, for many years she has been producing tableware designs for Tiffany in New York, where she acts as a consultant. There have been ventures into interior design and three books - on Irish crafts, gardens and homes.
Whatever the task in hand, invariably it retained a close association with Ireland. Sybil Connolly has managed to be both global and domestic in her career, building a business with an international clientele from one house in Merrion Square and a relatively small staff. "To my mind, Sybil is the best PR Ireland ever sent out," says Pat Crowley. "She has been a marvellous ambassador for this country." The name Sybil derives from ancient prophets who could see into the future. In many ways Sybil Connolly, now aged 76 and in frail health, foretold the success Irish fashion is now enjoying at home and abroad.
Ambassador Of Design, A Portrait Of Sybil Connolly, will be shown on RTE 1 on Wednesday, December 3rd at 10.10 p.m.