Celebrated for dressing Princess Diana and creating the uniforms of British Airways staff, Paul Costelloe rose to become one of Ireland’s most successful fashion designers.
In Ireland he has been associated with Dunnes Stores for the past 10 years for his collections of homewares, menswear and womenswear, a collaboration recently celebrated at his home in Monkstown.
Following in the wake of Sybil Connolly who was the first to give Irish fashion an international profile, he established his name in Dublin as a young designer in 1979 having trained at the Grafton Academy followed by a period in Paris and Milan.
His tailoring and early use of Donegal tweed and Irish linen made his name – breezy early dresses in the 1980s made from handkerchief linen were a sensation. That mix of tailoring and what is called flou with a strong colour sense continued to mark his style throughout his career along with a nostalgia for the freedom of the 1960s. He was also a gifted painter.
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Easygoing, low-key but disciplined were words used to describe his clothes, which could also accurately describe his personality. Forthright in his opinions which often generated controversy, he had a healthy disrespect for the rhetoric and hype surrounding the industry. His candour and lack of pretension made him popular with the British press.
His real break came in London in 1983/84 when he was accepted as a member of a select group of British designers called the London Designer Collection, where he showed in London for the first time. That later became London Fashion Week, where he has shown for the past 40 years, most recently in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom where his collections were always the first on the schedule marking the opening of the week.
The youngest of seven children of Willie Costelloe, a raincoat manufacturer who was the son of a Limerick publican and a member of the old IRA, his mother Catherine Curran was an American from New York. Paul grew up with a stylish mother and four sisters which certainly had an influence on him.
Educated in Willow Park and Blackrock College, after leaving school he spent a year at the Grafton Academy before heading to Paris and a job with Jacques Esterel, the avant-garde French fashion designer. From Paris, he went to Milan, working at the department store La Rinascente. Then he took off for New York, which he recalled as the toughest part of his career, before returning to Ireland and setting up in business.
His couture collections in London, shown twice yearly, demonstrated the freedom to design without commercial constraint as the clothes were only made to order and not produced for ready-to-wear sale. His last show, for winter 2025, was staged in Dublin’s City Hall in September, but he was unable to attend due to illness.
He is survived by his wife Anne (née Cooper) and their seven children, Robert, Gavin, Justin, Paul Emmet, William, Nicholas and daughter Jessica. His son William, an artist like his father, has been increasingly involved in the business, as has his daughter Jessica, who is also a trained opera singer.
