Born: April 8th, 1933
Died: January 27th, 2025
Mary O’Donnell, who has died aged 92, was a leading Irish fashion designer from Donegal who established a highly successful career both in Ireland and in the US, during the 1960s and 1970s. Part of a group of pioneering Irish couturiers of the period who included Sybil Connolly, Neilli Mulcahy and Irene Gilbert, she used Irish textiles in new and imaginative ways and won fame and international recognition.
O’Donnell was known particularly for her needlework, hand crochet, lace, embroidery and the sophisticated romanticism of her clothes. One outfit, for instance, shown at an exhibition in Dublin, featured an electric green crochet top threaded with green silk ribbon over a pink and green braided diamond patchwork skirt: an example of both her flamboyance and restraint.
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Clients for her couture included Princess Grace of Monaco, the Kennedys, Miranda Countess of Iveagh, Maureen O’Hara and other high-profile women both at home and abroad. Themes for her fashion collections often drew from Irish literature and the poetry of WB Yeats. She also designed the costumes (many with details from the Book of Kells) for the film Lovespell, , based on the story of Tristan and Isolde: it starred Richard Burton and was filmed in Ireland in 1979.
O’Donnell’s clothes were handmade and labour-intensive to produce. She once described her business as ‘basically a cottage industry’
O’Donnell was born in Kilcar in 1933, in the heartland of the Donegal Gaeltacht tweed industry. One of six children to parents James and Cassie O’Donnell, from an early age she had mastered the basic hand skills of knitting, embroidery and crochet, as well as spinning and carding wool. She would claim that she could both knit and read a book at the same time. Those skills were widespread locally and, in her last interview for the TG4 fashion series Snáithe in 2017, O’Donnell recalled that “there were 15 houses in the town, and each of the women were skilled at crochet and needlework”.
Determined to develop her craft, having spent a year in Mountcharles with a dressmaker cousin, she left Ireland at the age of 17 for New York and enrolled in the Traphagen School of Fashion on Broadway, working in restaurants to support her studies. Her ambition was to secure a position with the house of Mainbocher, then the most famous couture house in the US. It had been founded by the American couturier Main Bocher, who had already established a successful business in Paris with clients that included Wallis Simpson, before he returned to New York and rooms on 5th Avenue. O’Donnell achieved her ambition and remained there for more than two years, before returning to Dublin and working briefly with Sybil Connolly. She opened her own premises on Dawson Street in 1963.
Her style became known for its use of Irish textiles and craft skills in fresh new ways, particularly crochet – typical ensembles might be a voluminous skirt of poplin or gossamer tweed with a tight hand crochet top or white crochet trouser suits. Embroidery using traditional Irish motifs were other signature examples of her expert handwork, and an Irish Rose pattern was fashioned in many colours.
O’Donnell continued to spend a great deal of time in the US, where her work resonated with the Irish American establishment. She was friends with the Kennedy families and the family of Tip O’Neill (47th Speaker of the US House of Representatives), among many others. In 1970, one charity fashion show was held in the garden of then Senator Edward Kennedy’s house in Washington.
O’Donnell’s clothes, handmade and labour-intensive to produce, were necessarily expensive and the product of a team of more than 30 women working from their own homes in Donegal or Dublin, with ten in her Dawson Street workrooms. She once described her business as “basically a cottage industry”.
O’Donnell would claim that she could both knit and read a book at the same time
In 1965, she married a Scottish medical student John Duckworth, with whom she had a son, Richard. After their separation, she had another son, Donnacha, from a long and loving partnership with the late Michael Tierney. Following the closure of her Dawson Street premises in 1983, she ran a factory in Donegal for three years before returning to the US, where she maintained a strong following of loyal private clients.
O’Donnell retired in 1995 and returned initially to Dublin, then to Kilcar, where she remained until her death. Her archive, including many sketchbooks, was offered to the National Museum in Collins Barracks in 2019, but will be donated to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
She is survived by her sons Richard and Donnacha; a brother, Sean; daughters-in-law, grandchild, extended family and a wide circle of friends.
