Hat fan Mafra O'Reilly shares her memories of the fashion world of 1950s Dublin with Ruth Griffin.
Mafra O'Reilly. She is the flash of feather in L'Gueuleton; the striking figure at the Solomon Gallery; the lady in peacock at the races; the touch of glamour at the Dublin Horse Show. As the last of the bona fide socialites, she can often be seen at Dublin hot spots and is regularly featured in the social pages of Irish magazines. Always striking and impeccably dressed, her most notable characteristic is her penchant for theatrical hats.
"I do love hats," Mafra admits. "They cheer me up." Despite popular belief, most of her hats are made by London milliner Katherine Goodison, "but everyone says, if I wear something unusual, 'oh, that's a Philip Treacy', and they're not! I have only three of his actually."
What she does possess of the master milliner is his appreciation of the power of a hat - as he explains, "a hat is a positive symbol that thrills the observer and makes the wearer feel a million dollars". Mafra knows hats; she is closely involved with the process of their design and visits Goodison, in Pimlico, several times a year. She explains: "Basically, I order hats for any outfit which need dressing up or down; Katherine kind of knows the styles I like."
Mafra's first hat was a beret. As she got older her taste progressed to signature hats made by an exclusive couturier on Kildare Street that traded under the name Margaret Blythe, who happened to be the mother of Hollywood star Maureen O'Hara. Blythe's business was very highly regarded in the 1940s and 1950s, prior to O'Hara's success on the silver screen.
Mafra's visits to Margaret Blythe began in her teens, when she and her mother, Agnes, left their home in Galway - the Villa, on the Crescent in the centre of town - and ventured to Dublin. She describes her mother as always being very well dressed, "in a tailored kind of a way" thought of as "the country look". In the 1950s, ladies from the big Georgian houses visited Dublin once or twice a year to dine out, go to the theatre and shop for all their requirements for the season and the coming year.
Blythe's elite couture house catered for the very cream of Irish society, and Mafra, as a young socialite, was allowed one Blythe outfit per year, which included a hat.
Mafra's hats are not just a question of fashion. They signify a certain attitude towards life - daring, extravagant and designed to enhance rather than conceal her vivacious personality. The hats reveal her love of drama and the theatre. She was a member of the drama society in University College Galway (now NUI Galway) in 1950. "We put on Synge's Playboy of the Western World and we needed an authentic red shawl for the costume, so I went down to the Claddagh and borrowed one from one of the women on the street. My mother would go to the plays and she would say to me, 'Mafra, I have a piece of furniture just like that', amused at the idea that it was taken from our own family house." She went on to the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied French and English literature. Eventually, Mafra returned to Dublin to work for the French Embassy.
Mafra's home now, a Georgian house in Ranelagh, is what you might imagine Princess Margaret's royal apartments to have been like. She has created a home that is the embodiment of the style that has surrounded her all her life.
The entrance hall opens into several large reception rooms, with elegant drapes and long windows revealing a view of an immaculate lawn, bordered with roses. The drawing room is decorated with soft pink poplin sofas. Chinese artefacts peep out of classical niches and little round mahogany tables display numerous photographs, many of O'Reilly herself captured in a stylish ensemble and, of course, a dashing hat.
It is in this drawing room that Mafra and I have morning coffee, served on a silver tray by her dapper husband, whom she calls "the bold William". He learned the fashion business as an apprentice to Ronald Patterson of Mayfair, London, and who later had a couture business, also on Kildare Street. William regales us with tales of 1950s Irish fashion, a time when "models were truly models" and the shop girls at Marjorie Boland on Grafton Street ironed the wrapping tissue when things were quiet.
Mafra is a regal hostess; her white-blond hair is swept into a neat bouffant chignon, and she is wearing a bright red boucle jacket, a white blouse ruffled dramatically around her neckline, and a large pearl-bead necklace. A black panelled skirt to the knee and crocodile court shoes with a golden buckle complete her outfit. She is a reminder of what style is, glamorous in the true sense of the word - a combination of persona and clothing, drama and discipline. As Noel Coward said, "style implies great discipline".
O'Reilly retained the hat through the phase when it was seen as a remnant of a bygone age, until today when the hat's formality has re-emerged as an extravagant mark against uniformity, rather than a social norm.
Having lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, Mafra acquired a Parisian attitude to style. As she says, "They don't have a huge wardrobe, but they do buy a small amount every year and are able to accessorise well. They are very careful about it and it's all very planned, and quality counts for an enormous amount."
It was the discipline of French women that furnished her sense of style, but it was her older sister, Honor, who cultivated Mafra's talents in her early years. Honor was three years older than Mafra and was "madly interested in fashion".
"I was a gombeen woman in comparison," Mafra laughingly says, something that is very hard to believe now. When talking of Honor, Mafra's face lights up: "Oh she had a great sense of style and would help you out if she took the mood." Honor - who, William adds, "died of a broken heart" - was an elegant woman; a photograph from the 1950s of her smiling, resplendent in a fur at "one of the hotels", confirms this.
It can be imagined, from the stories over coffee, that Mafra and Honor were a mischievous combination. "One day when I was 11 or 12 and Honor was 14 or thereabouts, she took a fancy to a black Astrakhan fur coat in a pawn shop in Oughterard, [Co Galway], that she just had to have. We tried to think of ways to buy it. The coat was seven and sixpence and we were given one penny for our pocket money every week, so you can imagine how long it would take to get the money for the coat. Together we came up with a plan to pawn our brother Thomas's clothes to get the money for the coat."
On the morning in question, the pair went into town with Thomas's wardrobe and pawned his clothes. They then had enough money to buy the coat; the precious fur was Honor's at last. She threw the coat on for the bicycle ride home but the coat began to itch. When it became unbearable, Honor abruptly pulled the flea-infested coat from her back and tossed it into a nearby river.
Mafra remembers, on their return, her brother standing on the stairs of their house in nothing but a linen hat, a vest and a pair of sandals, wondering where all his clothes had gone. Interestingly, if the photograph of Honor on Mafra's table is anything to go by, this episode didn't interrupt her love affair with fur.
According to Mafra, in the 1950s "everyone had a fur". Switzer's had a large fur department, and Vard's and Barnardo on Grafton Street catered to the era's style.
Mafra describes the wardrobe of an affluent 1950s lady: "For starters you would need a little black cocktail dress, from Dior at Brown Thomas or Irene Gilbert, or if you saw something in a magazine you would bring it in to Margaret Blythe and she would get everything for you - gloves, hats, and shoes, and everything to match. A hat was essential. I wore a lot of berets for day and a more extravagant evening hat for night." Underwear was purchased from Walpole on Suffolk Street.
If you were to flick through Creation magazine, the Irish style magazine from the 1950s, Mafra's world would jump from its pages. The features are interspersed with advertisements for Irish couturiers such as Irene Gilbert; exotic furs from Vard or Barnardo, elegant suits by Jack Clarke, or the exclusive hair salon The Swan.
The most chic shopping routes were east of Grafton Street: Kildare Street and South Anne Street. Mafra's recollections of establishments such as Switzer's, Walpole, Barnardo, and Margaret Blythe, depict the lost shopping geographies of Dublin. In contrast to today, shopping was not a one-stop concern. Shopping was planned, leisurely, and it included a plethora of department stores and dressmakers, milliners, furriers, and salons.
All these formed Dublin's fashionable network. It is not just the fashions in a lady's wardrobe that have changed; it is the places and rituals of dressing. Mafra's remarkable memories provide valuable information about fashion in Ireland and capture its particular quality.
The wardrobe of a 1950s lady was specific - a fur, a black dress, one costume a year in wool or tweed, a hat for day, and perhaps a few evening hats. Today a woman's wardrobe comprises a wide array of styles, periods, fabrics and colours, changing every season. One thing that can be learned from Mafra's sense of style is how to transcend fashions and exist in your own time. Mafra's life flows like a Nancy Mitford novel: dances and furs, morning coffee from a silver pot, pearls and chaperones, and reading literature at the Sorbonne - all undertaken as she has lived, with grace, charm and hats set at a jaunty angle.