‘Ireland’, wrote former American Vogue editor, Bettina Ballard, in her 1960 book of memoirs, In my Fashion, ‘was a completely unexpected centre for fashion for everyone but Carmel Snow. We were drawn en-masse to Dublin by the personable, milk-skinned Irish charmer named Sybil Connolly who showed a small collection made of Irish tweeds and linens in Dunsany Castle and bewitched us all into buying models or filling our editorial pages with them.’
Forty-five years after performing this extraordinary and unexpected feat, Sybil Connolly died in May 1998. She had been ill and largely unseen in public for the previous two years but her career as a fashion designer had begun its retreat decades earlier. Indeed, given her relatively low profile during the 1980s and 1990s, the notion of Sybil Connolly as a global celebrity was hard to imagine for anyone not familiar with the history of Irish fashion. But this had really once been the case: during the 1950s, she had been the most-famous, most-admired, most-industrious, and most-travelled Irishwoman in the world. For a few years, she had seemed to represent modern Ireland, then a young country aware (and proud) of its past but prepared to take on the future with confidence. Then, in the 1960s, she gradually lost the high position attained, the attention dwindled, the press cuttings diminished. By 1970, although she still had twenty-eight years to live, Sybil Connolly appeared to belong to a vanished era.
Because her ascent was so rapid and her acceptance of acclaim so confident it would be understandably easy to imagine that Sybil Connolly’s career as a fashion designer had been carefully planned. Perhaps this was the case, but the available evidence suggests otherwise. Born in Wales on 24 January 1921, the daughter of an Irish father (originally from county Waterford, he worked for an insurance company) and a Welsh mother, she only moved to Ireland after the death of the former when she was fifteen. Always keenly interested in clothes, at the age of seventeen she was apprenticed to a London dressmaking firm run by two Irish brothers, Jim and Comerford Bradley. In later years, she liked to tell how, as a junior, she had held pins at fittings for Queen Mary in Bradley’s where, she said, there were no less than ninety-eight fitting rooms due to the large number of English debutantes who bought their clothes from the company.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Sybil Connolly returned to Ireland in 1940 and found a job in Dublin at Richard Alan, a business which both manufactured and sold women’s clothes. Owned by the redoubtable Jack Clarke, Richard Alan was to provide Sybil Connolly with her launching pad as a designer, but not before she had worked there for more than ten years. Since so much attention was paid to her after she had become successful, little is recorded of this long period in waiting. But she was obviously learning her trade and preparing herself for the opportunity which eventually came her way. In a profile of the designer written in 1960, the novelist Kate O’Brien remembered seeing Sybil Connolly at a party in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel in 1946 long before she had received any recognition for her work. Asking about a striking, dark-haired woman, O’Brien learnt her name was Sybil Connolly who worked at Richard Alan where she designed clothes. ‘“If she does,” I thought,” she can wear them too; and she must be her own best model.” For the girl in the severe gold vesture, sitting alone with her dark head bent in the harsh light of that banqueting hall was a figure to impress imagination and memory.’
If, as Kate O’Brien suggests, Sybil Connolly was already designing at Richard Alan in the immediate post-war period, she was receiving no public recognition for her efforts. During this period, Jack Clarke hired a French designer, Gaston Mallet, formerly with the house of Balmain to work for him in Dublin. According to an interview with the Irish Times in January 1982, Sybil Connolly was upset that Mallet during his five seasons with Richard Alan never used any Irish fabrics. ‘I felt like a voice in the wilderness,’ she said of her first efforts to promote domestic materials.
Eventually, she was given an opportunity to do so. In early 1952, Gaston Mallet left Richard Alan seemingly at short notice and Sybil Connolly was placed in charge of the workrooms with official responsibility to produce the next season’s collection. Here, after a very long period in the wings, was a chance to take centre-stage and she seized it with all the eagerness of an actress given her moment in a Hollywood musical. Rather than simply continue in the French vein established by Mallet, she decided to give her clothes a distinctively Irish flavour. When I decided to do a collection of my own, she rather grandly told the Detroit Times in May 1959, I thought it certainly should have a theme, and why not an Irish one? But what? One twilight evening in Donegal, I stopped to talk with some little ones playing in front of a white-washed cottage. Their mother came to call them and as she stood framed in the door of her cottage wearing the traditional plaid skirt and black shawl, I knew that was what I would design. A later telling of this story moved the location from Donegal to Connemmara, but that scarcely matters; this is a perfect example of Connolly’s romantic approach to fashion: the twilight evening, the remote rural spot, the white-washed cottage, the ‘little ones’ and their mother in her traditional costume, and the designer’s ability to come up with a good story when she needed one.
Sybil Connolly made her public debut as a designer in 1952, the same year that John Ford’s The Quiet Man was released and this film shares certain characteristics with her clothes, in particular a sophisticated but understated deployment of apparently timeless motifs. Maureen O’Hara’s costumes in The Quiet Man would not have looked out of place in an early Connolly collection, with the designer’s emphasis on traditional materials and forms.
It is not known exactly how Sybil Connolly came to the attention of Carmel Snow, the Dalkey-born editor, from 1932-57, of American Harper’s Bazaar but, within months of Connolly designing her first collection for Richard Alan, Snow brought a group of American fashion press and buyers to Ireland. This was in July 1953. With the encouragement of Lady Dunsany, herself a client of the designer, a Sybil Connolly collection – followed by a candlelit dinner – was shown to the visitors in the elegant surroundings of Dunsany Castle. The occasion, which was a triumph for the designer, launched her American career and, by the time Connolly set out on her first trip to the States in the autumn of that year, she had already been featured on the August cover of Life magazine with a romantic photograph of the well-known model, Ann Gunning, in a full-length red Kinsale cape and white crochet evening dress and the headline, ‘Irish invade Fashion World.’ Inside, there were further photographs of Gunning at Dunsany Castle where she was also shot by Richard Avedon for a spread in the October 1953 edition of Harper’s Bazaar while Virginia Pope in the New York Times wrote: ‘Fashion was interwoven with the lore and customs of Ireland in a fascinating manner in the Sybil Connolly collection.’
During that first trip in 1953, Connolly – in a routine that she was to continue on her two annual visits to America throughout the fifties – covered some twenty thousand miles over five weeks visiting every major city where she provided commentary for showings of her clothes as well as giving countless interviews and attending a large number of social engagements; but it was an introduction to New York’s foremost fashion publicist, Eleanor Lambert, on this visit which was to prove most propitious. Lambert, who was to become a lifelong friend, was captivated. ‘(Sybil) was a smash hit in America as soon as she arrived,’ she told the Irish Times in November 1997. ‘Her charm seemed to diffuse throughout the country. Everything about her was so glamourous and wonderful. She was almost alone in Irish fashion; she brought over a feeling of it as an entity in itself.’ Thereafter, like Carmel Snow, Lambert – who had a widely-syndicated newspaper column – promoted Connolly at every turn.
Not that the designer was difficult to promote because she was not. ‘American women are more remarkable than American skyscrapers,’ she announced on her first visit. It was a comment that was picked up by newspapers across the United States and it can have done little harm in promoting sales of her clothes which, by the end of the debut visit, were carried by nine American and three Canadian department stores. ‘No woman can be really elegant until she’s over forty,’ was another of Connolly’s ‘soundbites’ and one that must have gratified her clients as few of them would have been younger. She featured regularly in gossip columns like that in the Hollywood Reporter of March 1955: ‘Sybil Connolly emerged from Louella Parsons’s house after a late night soirée and exclaimed, “It’s like Ireland – there’s dew on the grass!” “What did you expect?” Mike O’Shea said, “Chanel No 5?”’ She knew how to keep her name in the news and, at one time or another during the ‘fifties, it was reported that she had been offered a job designing costumes for Hollywood; that she was about to produce a line of clothes for men; that an American company would make a film of her life; and that she had been commissioned to write her autobiography. Other stories, while seeming even more improbable, were actually true: she redesigned the habits of no fewer than three orders of nuns and a Sybil Connolly perfume was created for her by the monks of Caldy Island in Wales.
In a Saturday Evening Post profile of the designer in November 1957, it was noted that three-quarters of her gross earnings (then estimated at $500,000 per annum) originated in the United States, ‘a tribute of American womanhood to Sybil’s stylesmanship.’ In the same feature, she commented, ‘America made me. America will always have first claim to my production.’ Notwithstanding this renown across the Atlantic, Connolly twice travelled to Australia – in October 1954 and in August 1957 – where a similar success attended her.
During the 1950s, an Irish woman travelling around the world in this manner and running her own successful business was a highly unusual phenomenon. ‘I am a freak in Ireland,’ she told the Saturday Evening Post in November 1957. By the end of the ‘fifties she employed around one hundred women, half of them working from their own homes where they wove tweed or hand-crocheted lace. While her character was unquestionably tough, she also had great charm and this was what most people who dealt with her professionally were shown. In the Saturday Evening Post profile, it was reported, ‘American department store executives find themselves charmed by Sybil’s smiling hazel eyes and, at the end of a delightful conversation, discover that they have been face to face with an astute saleswoman. Sybil has proved herself repeatedly an expert at the Invisible Sell.’ The same feature remarked that ‘her charm is thought worth mentioning even in Ireland’ and indeed charm – along with references to the beauty of her pale skin, her large hazel eyes, and soft, seductive voice – is a word repeatedly used in all press interviews with Sybil Connolly. ‘Her charm was faultless and alarming,’ wrote Gabrielle Williams in a posthumous notice published in the Adam’s catalogue for the sale of Sybil Connolly’s possessions in November 1998. ‘She was not only a great designer,’ wrote Williams, ‘she was also a great opportunist, seizing the moment unhesitatingly.’
But was Sybil Connolly as great a designer as she was an opportunist? Her cut and sense of proportion were never especially original, but she knew how to interpret current trends for her own clientèle. Her drawing skills were not strong, but this is by no means unusual among designers and she preferred to drape fabric over a model when deciding how it should be used. She constantly mentioned her great love of material and how this was the starting point for her ideas. When the chance to design a collection for Richard Alan arrived, she wisely used the fabrics of her own country, in particular linen at its lightest. She used to say that she first discovered this featherweight weave in a Northern Irish factory where it had been manufactured many years earlier to be made into fine linen handkerchiefs for the monarchs of Europe, but that after the First World War ‘there weren’t enough of them left around.’ Famously, she took this linen and had it closely pleated to produce lengths which might then be used for dresses and skirts. Nine yards of linen were needed to create one yard of finished material. The first piece made in this way to be shown in the United States, a white evening dress called First Love, using three hundred linen handkerchiefs and containing more than five thousand pleats caused a huge stir and helped to make her name among Americans. The greatest merit of her pleated linen was that garments from which it was made were almost uncrushable. Harper’s Bazaar noted in June 1958 that a Connolly pleated linen skirt ‘will pack into a small duffel bag and emerge unscathed.’ Sybil Connolly’s pleated linen is as remarkable a contribution to fashion history as Mario Fortuny’s Delphos pleated silk dresses made at the beginning of the 20th century and like them will forever be associated with the name of one designer.
Pleated linen was by no means the only instance of Sybil Connolly taking old forms and giving them a fresh twist for the non-Irish market. She bought large bales of red flannel traditionally used for petticoats in Connemara and had this made into quilted skirts which were then shown, in the time-honoured manner, with white cambric blouses and black shawls. By reinterpreting peasant dress, the designer was anticipating bohemian fashion created by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Bill Gibb in the 1970s. She also recognised the demand for fabrics that had none of the stiff heaviness of their predecessors, as customers demanded greater freedom and ease of movement from their clothes. Therefore, although she loved to use tweed in her collections, this was specially woven for her in unusually light weights and rich colours. And she was not above deploying the most mundane of fabrics when so inspired; a dress called Kitchen Fugue for summer 1954 had a full billowing skirt made from lengths of striped linen tea towelling. Examples of Carrickmacross lace and hand-made crochet were other regular features of her collections. Much of this material was produced for her by out-workers in their own homes. Production was, therefore, relatively slow; it would take five weeks to make a pleated linen dress and up to nine months for one in Carrickmacross lace. Exclusivity was one advantage of this long production process. In March 1955, she told the Los Angeles Examiner that her work was rarely copied ‘because of the individual handwork that is done on them. The fabrics are all handmade in our cottage industries.’ In its cover story on the designer, Life magazine observed ‘because of inexpensive labor costs in Ireland, US stores can import the styles ready-made and, even after duty, sell them at prices relatively low for a top European label.’ A strapless pleated linen evening dress by Sybil Connolly was shown in the New York Times in April 1954 selling for $300 and prices remained largely unchanged over the next few years. In November 1957, the Saturday Evening Post gave $130 as the price for a day dress, $180 for a custom-tailored suit in Donegal tweed and $350 ‘or thereabouts’ for an elaborate ballgown. This meant that Sybil Connolly’s clothes were usually much cheaper, not only than those of other European designers, but also those of the top American names at the time, and it is this fact which may go some way towards explaining her popularity in the United States.
Another lure – as far as her American clients were concerned – was the inherent romanticism of her work and she played on American perceptions of Ireland as a simple, unspoilt country. ‘“The trouble with the world,” Miss Connolly feels,’ announced the American Holiday magazine in February 1962, ‘“is that people have forgotten about romance” and her fashions, with their generous sweep of gossamer linen and silk, are an eloquent plea for a return to bygone fancies.’ Her inspiration almost invariably came from the past. 18th-century Irish plasterwork designs were reproduced in embroidery on her dresses for spring/summer 1954 and late-19th century ladies’ riding costumes were obviously the basis for her collection a year later. Then there were the touches of Irish peasant style that consistently cropped up in her designs, not just through items such as red flannel skirts but also in woven straw caps for her summer 1954 collection inspired by the thatch on Connemara cottages. She often gave her clothes Irish names: a 1954 evening ensemble was called Man of Aran and a flecked tweed suit from the same period Lough Corrib. In January that year, Betty Spurling, head of fashion television at the BBC, remarked on ‘the Connolly flair for taking the simple, age-old weaves worn by Irish peasants and introducing them to the world of haute couture.’ But not everyone, and least of all the Irish, was enchanted with her vision of Irish peasantry. Myles na Gopaleen satirised her in his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times and, in a June 1953 profile of her in the same paper, she responded to criticisms that her work was at times too ‘stage-Irish’ with the observation, ‘This is a terribly competitive business. Unless Ireland can produce something distinctive, she will get nowhere.’ Abroad, she promoted Ireland and boasted of the influence the country had on her: ‘I couldn’t design a button anywhere but in Ireland’ she told Time magazine in March 1953 and in July 1954 explained to the Evening News, ‘You see, I think I’d be a flop anywhere else. I just couldn’t design unless I lived here.’ ‘It’s a shame to have such beautiful fabrics, such resources for fine handwork and not use them in fashion’ she is quoted as saying in the Dallas Morning Post in October 1953.
When Sybil Connolly had eventually departed from Richard Alan in March 1957, she had indulged her fondness for the romantic past by moving into a large house at 71 Merrion Square, Dublin. ‘The house that linen built,’ as she called it, reflected Sybil Connolly’s outlook and was furnished predominantly with antiques from the 18th century or copies of such pieces. Here she lived alone for more than forty years. She never married, even though her name was associated with a number of men during the 1950s. ‘For the moment, I like to buy my mink and diamonds myself,’ she told the Daily Mail in January 1957. She was keenly religious all her life, claiming that her Roman Catholic faith meant ‘everything to me. It is the whole centre of my life.’ She would have each new collection blessed by a priest prior to its presentation and gave pride of place in her Merrion Square private sitting room to a very large French carved fruitwood statue of the Virgin Mary while a French ivory figure of the crucified Christ hung over her bed. These instances of a personal faith contrast with the press cuttings of her public life which suggest a constant round of social and professional engagements.
During the latter part of the 1950s, Sybil Connolly had become one of the foremost figures in Ireland. In January 1956 Punch had noted that while there were indisputably other Irish fashion designers, ‘it is the Connolly collection which has become a bi-annual social event attended by the Irish gentry, men as well as women.’ The gentry were among Connolly’s best customers. In addition to Lady Dunsany, there were the Earl of Dunraven’s two daughters, Ladies Melissa and Caroline Wyndham-Quin, photographed by Norman Parkinson for the July 1954 edition of Vogue wearing Sybil Connolly ballgowns. In the Irish Times in November 1997, Melissa Wyndham-Quin, now Lady Brooke (her 1959 wedding dress had also come from Sybil Connolly) remembered meeting the designer in 1953. ‘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 anymore; I gave my boyfriends all the handkerchiefs.’
So established had Sybil Connolly become by this time that she was able to ask her clientèle to model for her. The late Aileen Plunket was photographed in 1954 wearing a Connolly ballgown in the grounds of Luttrellstown Castle while for the Holiday magazine spread of February 1962, models included Mariga Guinness in Leixlip Castle, the Marchioness of Waterford (formerly Caroline Wyndham-Quin) at Curraghmore, the Countess of Donoughmore at Knocklofty House, and Wendy Slazenger in Powerscourt House. Her list of American clients was just as impressive, numbering members of the Rockefeller, Mellon, and Dupont families. Film actresses who bought her clothes included Merle Oberon, Rosalind Russell (for whom Sybil Connolly designed the costumes of a 1965 film called Mother Superior), Elizabeth Taylor, Dana Wynter, and Julie Andrews. A feature on Adele Astaire in Women’s Wear Daily in October 1968 noted ‘Sybil Connolly makes many of her clothes.’ Jacqueline Kennedy was painted for her official White House portrait wearing one of the designer’s pleated linen dresses and when the presidential widow visited Dublin in July 1967, she lunched with Sybil Connolly in Merrion Square.
By that date, however, Sybil Connolly’s career as a fashion designer was already on the wane and her scrapbooks show a steady diminution in press attention through the 1960s, with the last entries dating from 1970. Tastes in fashion changed but Sybil Connolly remained the same and so, gradually, she found herself left behind. Even at the height of her success, there had been signs that this decline would happen sooner or later. The Irish Times review of her autumn/winter 1954 range observed that the Connolly day suits were ‘basically much the same as those in her previous collections.’ Two years later, the London Times reported that neither Sybil Connolly nor Irene Gilbert, her only major competitor as a designer in Dublin, ‘offer any startling ideas likely to revolutionise the fashion world, but both continue their pioneer work in the development to couture level, and presentation, of their native fabrics.’ By February 1959, the New York Times could comment of a Sybil Connolly collection that she ‘showed tweeds, as she always has and always will.’ In October that same year, she told the Washington Post all women designers ‘know that good fashion does not need to change.’
Regretfully, her judgement was wrong and, as a result, Sybil Connolly found herself overlooked once trends moved on from the style of her heyday. Although not yet aged fifty, she managed to sound like an old woman when she told the Irish Times in December 1970, ‘I never liked the mini styles and I always remember what Dior once said to me in Paris. He said, “A woman should show her curves, not her joints” and this was so true.’ In September 1972 she told the Irish Press: ‘I cannot understand why young people today set out so deliberately to make themselves look so awful. As for trousers, I hate them too and only ever showed two as a concession in my collection ... My clients did not approve as they said they had always associated me with such feminine clothes.’
In 1992, the designer’s clothes looked little different to thoseshe had produced some forty years earlier. She still offered ballooning pleated linen skirts, Carrickmacross lace blouses, tweed day suits, and coats. But her clientele was greatly reduced and by this time Connolly was focussing her attention on other areas of design. Her own house in Merrion Square had always been a showcase of her excellent if conservative taste in interior decoration – among the earliest features on the property was one in House Beautiful in 1967 – and this preoccupation came to take up more of her time. She was responsible for the internal refurbishment of the late 18th-century Swiss Cottage in Cahir, county Tipperary; wrote or co-authored several books on Irish homes, gardens, and crafts; and helped to revive interest in the flower pictures of Mrs Delany, the 18th-century friend of Dean Swift and Fanny Burney. In the 1980s, Sybil Connolly began to work as a designer of tableware for Tiffany & Co of New York, of glassware for Tipperary Crystal, and of linens for Brunschwig & Fils and Schumacher, as well as becoming associated with the Kilkenny potter, Nicholas Mosse.
She kept herself busy and, as much as possible, in the public eye even if the latter was no longer especially interested in her fashion designs. Sybil Connolly’s abiding fame in Ireland was shown six months after her death when the contents of 71 Merrion Square were auctioned in November 1998. A record of visitors came to the four-day pre-sale viewing – more than two thousand on one day alone – and the James Adam salerooms were completely filled for the auction itself of 600-plus lots. The preponderance of women private bidders reflected the nature of Sybil Connolly’s appeal, as did the prices paid for certain items. While many furniture lots fetched figures comfortably within the estimates, individual pieces of personal significance to the designer tended to surpass all expectations. A set of eight cushions, for example, carrying an estimate of no more than £300, went for £1,300; a box of the designer’s sketches (estimate £100-£200) made £1,600; and £440 was paid for a bale of her pleated linen in black, although its estimate was only £150-£250. Sybil Connolly might no longer be as famous as she had once been, but her name had not slipped out of the spotlight.
In February 1954, the Daily Telegraph fashion correspondent, Winefride Jackson, writing about whether women could ever truly succeed as fashion designers, noted that a year or two earlier American buyers and press had been ‘looking for a new idea, a new person to write about, and there was Sybil Connolly with all the romanticism behind her, plus her own skill.’ Presciently, Jackson added ‘it remains to be seen, after the fuss and the furore has died down, just what place she will eventually occupy in fashion.’ That place is not as great as might once have seemed to be the case but Sybil Connolly deserves to be remembered in Irish history for more than just her designs. She was the country’s first fashion designer to attract international attention, the first woman in Ireland to set up her own successful business selling overseas, and one of the first people to promote Irish products and skills in the global market. If she was not a designer of the first rank, she was nonetheless one of the most remarkable women in Ireland in the 20th century.

Robert O’ Byrne is a Fashion Writer
Acknowledgements: The author and editor are most grateful to John Connolly for permitting Sybil Connolly’s scrapbooks to be consulted.