Getting Dressed: Jon Moynihan
Brigid Keenan
I love a good rags-to-riches story and here is one in I was involved at the start. Almost 50 years ago, when I was women’s editor of the Observer, I wrote about a family devoted to good works: the father, a Dr Moynihan, had been slow to qualify because each time there was a medical emergency somewhere in the world he would go there to help.
The Moynihan family pinpointed the years not by where they took holidays as most people do, but by the disasters they were involved with: the uprising in Hungary, the earthquake in Agadir etc.
At the time, I remembered being impressed by the young son, Jon, 22, who had just left university (he had won a scholarship to Balliol) and was about to leave for Calcutta to work for War on Want.
He stayed there for 18 months, helping with a cholera epidemic, a tsunami and the Bangladesh war (one of the best times of his life, he recalls). Then, back in the UK, feeling slightly lost (he says he is mildly autistic), he was advised by Gordon Reece (the political strategist who helped Margaret Thatcher into power and was an old boy of Moynihan’s school, Ratcliffe) that he should go to business school in America – advice Moynihan followed, opting for a year’s course in finance at MIT.
Reece also advised the rather scruffy young man on how to improve his image, even contributing a couple of his own old suits to the cause. Remembering this later, Moynihan wore a Blades suit for his first important interview after MIT – and got the job. ‘It had to be the suit – it certainly can’t have been what I said,’ he laughs. After half a lifetime of successful ladder-climbing in the financial world, Moynihan – ‘intense, compact, effervescent’, according to the Wall Street Journal – took over the PA Consulting Agency in 1992. It was a huge but failing business worth £10 million and, over the next 23 years, he transformed it: the company was sold in 2013 for £1 billion. One newspaper described it as ‘the most important firm you never heard of’. Moynihan left PA and now has a hand in a score of companies, as well as, in keeping with the family tradition, being involved in a great number of charities – including the Royal Albert Hall, which is currently being radically transformed in time to celebrate its 150th birthday in 2021. The restoration of the outside walls alone is going to cost £10 million. So it is just as well that the Hall, said to be the busiest major concert venue in the world, has what Moynihan calls ‘fantastic donors’. This April, it hosts the Olivier Awards. Moynihan met his British wife, Patricia Underwood, an award-wining hat designer, at a Thanksgiving lunch in America, where she ran her business. Now, after years of coping with a longdistance relationship, both of them toing and froing across the Atlantic, they live in London (where Moynihan supports Chelsea FC). Like his long-ago mentor, Reece, Moynihan, 70, has become a dashing dresser
and can afford the best of everything. When he became CEO of PA, he bought five pairs of shoes from Lobb to last until his retirement, ‘which they more or less did’. His shirts almost always come from Charvet in Paris (they do collar and cuff replacements if needed) and his winter socks in cashmere/silk come from Ilux.
When Moynihan started as the boss at PA, he wanted to send a message of serious purpose to the firm whose professional standards had declined: ‘I recognised the need to have a small degree of personal style to promote this. I opted to wear only black and white: black (or black pinstripe) suits, white shirts, black and white ties. Towards the end of my career at PA, I relaxed my rule enough to have coloured stripes in my suits.’
These days, he believes the point of old age is to look as uninhibited as possible while retaining some tiny vestige of dignity. ‘I seem now to favour suits of orange and yellow – I have no idea why. They certainly don’t help with the dignity bit.’
Moynihan has been loyal to one tailor for decades: Terry Haste, one half of Kent & Haste, in Saville Row. ‘Terry makes suits that can be taken in or let out as fashion or girth waxes or wanes, from bell-bottoms to drainpipes and back again. A good suit is an invaluable investment – although, if you bicycle as much as I do, it is wise to purchase two pairs of trousers.’