PAUL COSTELLOE
There’s nothing wrong with chauvinism
OH how we love an impolitic designer. In a fashion world dominated by mutual backslapping and air kisses, there is a guilty pleasure in the unedited broadsides of an opinionated provocateur
Perhaps the industry’s most reliable font of controversial quotes, Paul Costelloe, has continued to ride the line between offence and good fun with mischievous relish. When he appeared on The Late Late Show earlier this year his broadsides against everyone from Camilla Parker Bowles (“very small”, wouldn’t swap his wife for her) to Penny Lancaster (“a bit gawky”) caused tutting and solidified his reputation for providing good copy — even when it opens him up to accusations of being like Donald Trump (whom he actually admires in some ways, he tells me).
Two of his sons sit in on our meeting at his London studio — perhaps in the hope that their presence might rein the older man in a little. But thankfully there is fat chance of that. Within a few minutes he’s given me the low-down on everything from Theresa May’s infamous leather trousers — “just awful” — to Ivanka Trump — “you wouldn’t kick her out (of bed, presumably)”.
At 72, with his brand expanding and having spread to the High Street via his collaboration with Dunnes Stores, and profits at his firm having tripled in the last three years, Costelloe seems to have less reason than ever to edit himself and, as with many people his age, you get the feeling that not much worries him any more. He laughingly shrugs when mentioning the fallout from his more risque riffs.
“I came out of my mews in Dublin after I appeared on The Late Late Show,” he recalls. “I spoke to the lady who runs the newsagent. She said ‘people said you don’t like women’. But I was having fun, that was it. There’s nothing wrong with chauvinism, we have a man in America who is a chauvinist and became president. I just like having a laugh. You can’t marry the world of women.”
London feels like a fitting backdrop for a conversation with Costelloe since this is where he made his name. We meet in Marylebone, not far from Princess Diana Park and Buckingham Palace and, of course, it will be 20 years this week since the princess met her untimely end in Paris. For more than a decade Costelloe had dressed her in his gorgeously tailored creations, commuting from his factory in Northern Ireland to Kensington Palace to do the fittings, and moving in a world that few Irish people had ever seen.
“I did cry when I heard she had died,” he recalls. “I was still in bed. It was one of the best days and worst days of my life. As a family we all went down and absorbed the tragedy together. She was an amazing person. In all the years working with her I probably couldn’t talk to her like a normal person. I could mention my children but that was it. She was confident in how she looked. I very much let her lead. She knew what she wanted.”
In those years, Costelloe’s status in England made him a sort of oracle of national style and when he decided to play Darwin — telling Image magazine that Irish women “only a couple of generations out of the bog... wouldn’t know style if it tottered up to them in 10-inch heels” — there was widespread tutting. He assures me things have got better and says that comments like this were made in the context of the overheating economy and the excesses of the Celtic Tiger.
“It was the beginning of the Celtic Tiger and I sensed that we were taking ourselves very seriously and we were going mad with cappuccinos and cigar smoking and how we looked. And the comments came in that context. I actually think that I recognised that the crash was coming. I could see us loving ourselves a little bit too much — and that doesn’t suit Irish women — or men.”
He says the style stakes are more even now on both sides of the Irish Sea, but that might be because the English have become more tacky, rather than us coming on. “You can go to Ascot and you can see English floozies, which are just as bad as Irish floozies. It’s all very risque and that’s fun.”
‘On one level women disapprove of chauvinism — on another they like it’
In person this is all delivered with a twinkle that would make it hard to take offence, even if you were dying to do so. The opinions are part of the brand. Of Theresa May’s leather trousers, he says: “I mean in one way they were brave but in another way just awful. She’s probably being advised by someone from Vogue to wear clothes like that. They’re trying to make her cool — but she’s not cool, she’s a middle-class English politician.” How about Leo Varadkar? “I think in terms of style, Leo is emulating Macron and Trudeau. He certainly has a specific, sporty style and that’s good. I think there are times he should wear a proper power suit. You have to be careful.”
Paul was the youngest of seven. His father was managing director of rainwear manufacturers, Valstar. The family were a bit posh by any standards — the house had a tennis court — and the Blackrock Collegeeducated baby of the family wanted to be a painter. Unfortunately a brother was already staking out that territory. Clothing design seemed a workable compromise, though he still thinks of himself as a painter.
His preliminary training came in Paris, which he hated because this was before it was considered chic to admire Irish people.
“The French looked down on us, so that was tough. I had a girlfriend from Toulouse. I would have to get the train from Paris to Toulouse to meet her and I would be sent back. They aren’t keen on Irish guys.” His love life didn’t massively improve, he says, but his career moved steadily upward. Next came a spell in Milan, where “Armani was still king” followed by a move to Marks & Spencer’s in London.
“They thought that because I’d been in Paris with Jacques Esterel, that I’d be able to make patterns. I managed to fool them for a month before I was moved to the HQ where it was like a holiday,” he recalls. “They had these huge tea trolleys come around every day. I was very tall and skinny after Paris so that was good.”
He moved to New York for a while in the 1970s and got a Green Card. “I found it terrible, difficult, unbelievable. Even just to order something I didn’t know what people were saying with their accents. I’d end up having a tuna sandwich every single day in the deli because that was the only thing I could get through to the Puerto Ricans slamming food down in front of me.”
He lost his job with Anne Fogarty — and remembers feeling relieved that at least he was far from home. “If you’re going to be out of work, make sure you’re in some big foreign city, because it’s too humiliating if it happens at home. I ended up working in the Empire State Building, looking down on all of them — designing lingerie. I was desperate for a job.”
He eventually returned to Ireland and established his own label, Paul Costelloe Collection. His reputation was as a master of cloth — an expertise honed in Italy and never outsourced, he selected every fabric himself — but it was when Princess Diana began sporting his creations that his career went stratospheric.
“I was still commuting from the factory in the North and of course you still had the bomb threats here. The fact that as an Irishman I was welcomed in the Palace was quite funny. I would be brought into her drawing room and there would be a lady-in-waiting there, initially and then she would go and we would do the fitting: she would take off her clothes. She reminded me of my sisters — she was tall, easy to deal with and appreciative. Not a prima donna by any means.”
As designer to Diana, he assumed an altogether loftier position in English society, opening at British Fashion Week, for instance, and designing BA’s uniform, a sort of designer laureate position that has since passed to Julien Macdonald — who possibly didn’t make this change easy by saying the existing design “made the cabin crew look like someone’s old granny queuing for a bus, because it was so unflattering”.
Costelloe shot back that Macdonald should “stick to designing evening slapper stuff ”.
“I was just being bitchy to Julien Macdonald,” says Paul, smiling ruefully. “I think I was probably being spiteful. I’m a voyeur, I look at everyone, I take in everything.”
Part of his criticism of Macdonald’s designs were that, like a lot of fashion, they seemed made with the very slim in mind. Costelloe says focussing exclusively on this demographic is something of a commercial mistake. “Large sizes is where the money is, but it’s where (designers) stupidly avoid. I’m now sampling in a size 12, I was sampling in a size 10. There is a lot of talk about exercise, but people only do it in bursts.”
One wonders how his more outrageous quips go over with Dunnes Stores’ CEO Margaret Heffernan — but he says they’re more alike that one might think.
“She is similar to me in that we both think on our feet. She is a great retailer, we have a lot in common, except money. It was a commercial decision. I went to Dunnes and asked if they’d be interested, because Debenhams already had jumped on the John Rocha bandwagon. You have to make a living and expose yourself more. If I lived in Italy it might be different, but the retail market here is certainly high street. You either join it or you struggle.”
That kind of pragmatism has probably helped greatly in predicting what those more discerning bog descendants will enjoy. Taxi drivers and cleaning ladies tell him that they slept on his sheets last night. “I’m more happy that those people are able to afford my things than the Lady Godivas of Dublin,” he says. “I sort of think I could run for mayor.”
He says there was a time in life when people “presumed” he was gay, because of the preponderance of gay men in the fashion world. Straight designers, he says, aren’t as conspicuous within the industry because they might not understand that only a small part of the whole scene is “going out at night with your boyfriend”.
His own family is important to him. He mentions their support several times. He is closing in on 40 years of marriage to Anne and they have seven children together, three of whom work with him. He says part of the secret of such a long marriage is accepting the essential differences between men and women.
“Women go for the inner man, whereas men go for looks first,” he tells me. “We know women are smarter than us, they know how to cajole and they take stress better than we can.” Later he adds: “You see so many women who marry the wrong man and say ‘but I love him’. I think on one level women disapprove of chauvinism and on another they like it. It gives them something to talk about with their friends. It gives them something to complain at. Mister nice guy doesn’t get that far.”
Perhaps in that vein, he tells me that he has great admiration for Donald Trump, even if his flagship building is a little tacky.
“Trump Tower is so ugly, the ugliest building in New York. But I respect that he is sticking to his policies. How many of them back down on everything. I think he is a great shakeup for politics.”
He’s not a fan of getting older but he still cycles everywhere and says work keeps him young. He has no intention of hanging up his boots.
“The only way I’ll step back more is if someone from the family steps up. I wouldn’t like a stranger. That’s just instinct. But I’m still excited by the work, so I can’t imagine stopping. And I wouldn’t like people to get bored.” Of that, there seems little chance.
Paul Costelloe will be launching his spring/summer 2018 collection at London Fashion Week, September 18. To learn more visit www.paulcostelloe.com