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“Mine’s been a chequered career. I’ve gone up and I’ve gone down and I’ve gone back up again,” Paul Costelloe tells me over biscuits in his studio on Great Portland Street, a week before his Spring/Summer 2025 show.
Costelloe has been showing at London Fashion Week since the event’s inception in 1984, exactly 40 years ago. His career, however, has been much longer. It has seen him work in all four fashion capitals and includes a stint as the personal designer to Princess Diana, as well as a sprawling licence business. He’s 79, but age is not on his mind: “In fashion, age isn’t relevant. It’s like being an athlete. No one asks your age when you’re competing in the 100-metre race.”
He’s an athlete no doubt. Costelloe cycled to our interview from Putney — according to Google Maps that’s approximately a 50-minute ride. I ask him why he became a fashion designer, and the cycling motif persists: “I was the youngest of seven children, and I was sort of left out in our big garden in Dublin with my little red bicycle. So I began painting from an early age. I had a great art teacher at school, who really encouraged me. I even won a national painting competition for under-16s at some point. But my older brother was also a painter, and he didn’t have an easy career, so I thought I’d try fashion instead.”
After a year at Dublin’s Grafton Academy of Fashion Design, Costelloe moved to Paris in 1968 to break into the industry, portfolio under arm. The picture he paints of those early career days is almost cinematic. “I met a man called Jacques Estelle, who was a couturier and he employed me. Clients would come in and place orders based on our designs — we would get paid per sketch sold. So I’d get maybe a couple of francs for a couple of drawings per day. It was really rough. I lived in a hotel on the Left Bank — my room was damp, the ceiling was green and I had a little bed. I still suffer from chest infections from that time. I loved it,” he says.
After Paris, Costelloe moved to London, though not for long. British high street retailer Marks Spencer was looking to expand to Italy by opening a studio in Milan. “They had heard that I had been trained in Paris, so they thought I must be great — which is rubbish. It’s a lesson, though, for the young. It’s not what you work with. It’s who you work with and where.”
Marks Spencer’s expansion plans never materialised, but Costelloe ended up working for Italian high-end department store La Rinascente for two years. “I was set up in Piazza Carlo Erba working with all the Italians, going to art classes in the evenings at Brera Milan’s artists’ quarter] and driving a little [Fiat] Cinquecento and having a wonderful single life in Milan.”
In 1974, Costelloe was invited to attend his brother’s wedding in North Carolina. Travelling to the US inspired him to visit New York, where he ended up staying for the next four years. His first job was as a designer at Anne Fogarty, but his designs didn’t seem to translate to the American market. “They eventually decided I wasn’t suitable. You know, the American woman is shaped differently to the English woman, and has a different lifestyle, too. Say, they wanted trousers, I wanted dresses.”
Costelloe had a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s East 53rd Street, meaning he had to find a way to stay in the city. That led to many odd jobs, including art director for a porn magazine called Screw and as a designer for athletics brand Bodywear.
“Still, that wasn’t what I wanted to do, which was to be the Irish Ralph Lauren.”
Building the Paul Costelloe brand
He moved back to the UK in 1978, when he started his own company in collaboration with Northern Irish manufacturers Strelitz in Dungannon, County Tyrone. “I was quite relevant at that point within the UK market because my clothes were very well made. It was all tailored. So over time we built the business. We had concessions throughout the UK — in Dickinson, all the John Lewis stores, Fenwick, Harrods and many more. As well as free-standing shops.”
It was in one of those shops, in Windsor, where one of Diana, Princess of Wales’s ladies in waiting saw his work in 1983. “The next thing I knew, I was in a cab to Kensington Palace with 20 garment bags. I remember she [Diana] stood on the stairs waiting to welcome me and we went into the drawing room and we started trying on garments. It worked really well. She was a perfect size 10 and a pleasure to work with. I remember looking out at Hyde Park and feeling like pinching myself. I’m from Dublin and this was right in the middle of the Troubles.”
He was appointed personal designer to Princess Diana and a year later, in 1984, he was invited to show at the inaugural London Fashion Week in Olympia. That collection was inspired by the Harrison Ford Amish drama, Witness, which translated into a line of romantic linen dresses.
Costelloe was unable to attend his runway show in February due to health complications. He is better now, but the inspiration behind this upcoming collection is “joy, enjoying life”. For the first time, the line will include wedding dresses, which will be available to purchase through premium bridal stores internationally.
Some of his team are working in the background as we speak, but things are relatively peaceful considering it’s less than a week till the big event. Costelloe has been opening LFW for the last 15 years, traditionally with a 9am curtain call. “It’s the calm before the storm,” says his head of design Jordi Vall. “We have castings all next week.”
The shows are a way to promote the company’s many licences, which sit at the core of the business. It all started with a full dining range for Wedgwood, the traditional English décor brand, launched in 1994 (now discontinued). Perhaps his most famous collaboration, however, is that with Irish department store Dunnes Stores, which launched with homeware in 2004 and later expanded into menswear and womenswear. Other licences include a leather handbag licence with Lloyd Baker, jewellery and soft accessories for QVC, eyewear for Dunelm Optical, suitcases for Randa, as well as a line of beauty products for Rafferty Hospitality.
But the Paul Costelloe brand is a family business at heart; one of the designer’s seven children, William, is the brand’s design director, creating the bulk of the prints in the collections. His wife Anne is a director, while his daughter Jessica heads up public relations. “My ambition is to step back from fashion eventually. To hire an old car and drive around France and paint. Everybody else is welcome to continue the company, and there’s plenty of people who would. But that’s not tomorrow. Maybe in 10 years time,” he says.
Before he retires, does he have any business advice for budding fashion designers? “Find a person who understands the financial end of things, so you can stay out of it,” he says referring to his financial director of more than 30 years, Gerald Mescal. “He was the financial controller for a shirt company I used to work for and that’s how we met. After I opened my first store in Dublin, he came and looked at the books and said, ‘Paul, you’re going nowhere with this little shop.’”
Luckily for British fashion, Costelloe proved him wrong.
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