As a kid, I remember always being fascinated by the reflection of the sun across the surface
of Balli Hai Bay and that constant reflecting sparkling when the sun was tracking across
the sky and it would lead this long golden trail across the bay.
I used to dream as a kid, and before even thinking of being a fashion designer, wouldn't
it be amazing to be able to make a dress cut out of the very shiny, sparkliest part in
the centre of that perfection?
I think the genesis or the beginning of my whole career without knowing it has been guided
by light.
It's almost a journey through light.
That was also influenced by my mom, who was incredibly, in my opinion, wonderfully stylish.
A drop-dead gorgeous woman, herself and her sister Brydie were like twins, and I was always
very aware of the beautiful clothes that mom used to wear, and mom had a very dear friend
called Hanny Laid, who was a local dressmaker, and Hanny knew that I was interested in clothing,
and she would point out to me all of the wonderful intricacies of how the garments were made,
teaching me this amazing appreciation for the handwork that would tend to them.
My sister, Deirdre, was my unwitting model.
She was the lucky recipient of her brother's designer talents and his aspirations to be
a designer.
And I remember making a coat for Deirdre.
I had sketched this coat back in, I think, 1985, it was.
I was 16 at the time, I believe, and I had giant shoulder pads, and it was really narrow
at the bottom, and I wanted to make this coat, and I couldn't find fabric, so I asked mom.
Mom gave me a bed sheet, a white cotton bed sheet, and I made my own pattern, cut it
out, sewed it by myself on mom's sewing machine, and I was thrilled to bits with myself because
it looked just like my sketch.
I guess fashion was percolating my head, I was really, I was being drawn to it.
My art teacher at the time recommended I go to Quark, two months into college, down
got homesick, and dropped out.
And at the time, I had a friend of mine who was studying in Quark also, and she was studying
to be a chef, and every week in coming home she'd tell me these great stories of all the
things she learned in culinary college that week, and I was really fascinated by what
she was doing and decided, I like to cook, I'm going to be a chef.
I absolutely loved it, two years later I graduated, top of my class as a commie chef.
I went to work in a very good restaurant in Galway, a very well-known restaurant called
the Malt House, and while I was working there, I started to feel the draw that I was missing
fashion.
Upon graduating, I'm working in Galway, I entered a competition in a national newspaper
to hopefully win second place prize, which was an outfit from Michael Mortel, who was
a well-known designer in Dublin, and I wanted to win this outfit for my sister Deirdre.
I entered the competition, and I won first place, and first place was the year's tuition
to the Barbara Burr College of Fashion Design in Dublin, so I packed away my knives and
decided to go back to college and train to be a fashion designer.
The head of the art college decided that we would have our graduation show in conjunction
with Brown Thomas, a very well-known, the most prestigious fashion store in Dublin,
and they were hosting a British designer called Gina Fratini, who at the time in the 80s was
the queen of ball gowns, and she was dressing Princess Diana and Princess Margaret and all
of the royals.
Gina also was one of the judges of the three judges that sat on the panel when we had our
graduation show, and at the end of the night, I won the evening wear designer of the year
category, and then at the, at, at icing to the cake, at the end of the night, I was also
voted designer of the year by the judges.
My prize was, my dresses were to be displayed in the windows of Brown Thomas and Clapton
Street, which was super exciting.
I remember standing in front of the windows on Grafton Street.
It's a pedestrian street, not gillantly pretending that I was just admiring the windows and
then listening to people's comments as they passed the windows, which was really exciting.
The night of the fashion show afterwards, Gina congratulated me backstage, and I immediately
said to her, can I have a job?
She said, well, I'm not really hiring right now, but if you do come to London, maybe you
could do an internship with us.
I'm like, okay.
And literally two months later, I moved to London and showed up on Gina's doorstep.
I worked on her upcoming collection.
She was really great.
She allowed me to design several pieces that made it into the collection.
She was a great mentor.
And at that time, I was hired by Donald Campbell.
And Donald Campbell was a really well-known British designer addressing the dowers of
Dutchesses.
And coming to the end of my two years there, I felt the world of fashion centered around
Paris, and that's where I wanted to be.
Literally the day after I handed in my notice, I got a call from a woman asking me to meet
with Lady Dale Tryon.
Lady Dale Tryon was Prince Charles's best friend.
She was Australian, and he was the one who gave her the nickname Kanga.
She was very well-connected in British society, and she was about to start a new collection
called Dale Tryon Couture.
They persuaded me not to move to Paris just yet, so I started working with them, and that
started an amazing year working as a designer in Night's Bridge with Dale, who was a crazy,
wonderful, lovable woman.
I remember one morning going into work, and she decided we needed buttons, and she didn't
like the buttons in London.
So at lunchtime we flew to Paris, and we went button shopping in Paris at the same couture
button maker that made Yves Saint Laurent's buttons, and we loved everything in the store,
so we ended up, we bought a dozen of everything, or two dozen of everything, of these handmade
couture buttons, and without realizing it, I think we spent £90,000.
I got to learn so much, I also got to learn not to buy your buttons before you know what
you're doing with them.
I moved to France, literally, I think maybe I had £500,000, but I didn't know what I
had to pay £500 in my pocket, which was very little money at the time, and in that year
I was attempting to find a job in fashion, and what I was doing, I was going to all of
these different fashion houses, and I was inventing little white lies.
I went to Christian Dior, and I told the young girl at the front desk at nine o'clock in
the morning that Bernard Arnault, who is the CEO of Dior, I'd had dinner with him the
night before, and he suggested I come in the morning to meet Nicole Bernard Arnault, the
head of the couture studio.
So she goes through her book, and she's like, hmm, I don't see you in here, I'm said, well
you can call him, and double check, and she's like, oh no, no, no, no, no, it's okay, just
take a seat.
She was lovely, and she went through my book, and then she closed my book, and she said,
I suggest you take this book and you throw it in the sand, and I like, as I like shrink
down on my seat, like oh my god, and she's like, but I see talent, why don't you just
redo this book?
She said this whole British Dutchess thing doesn't fly here in France, get rid of this,
redo your book, and why don't you come back and see me in a month, or call me, here's
my card, and come back and see me.
In the meantime, that I had gotten a job at another bar called Café Comptoir, I decided
that on every check that I gave to every customer, I would do a fashion illustration on the
back, Merci Beaucoup, Bonne Spare, Bonne Journée, Don, and that's how I signed them all, and
I drew thousands of them in the hope that I was going to meet somebody from fashion,
somebody somewhere who knew someone who had an aunt or an uncle or someone in fashion
that could get me a job.
None of my checks really paid off, but one of my fellow waiters, his best friend was
Sylvie Scanasi, and she had worked at Christian Lacroix for 10 years, and Sylvie was a costume
designer and desperately needed help sewing costumes.
I'm working on these fantastical costumes for the Baroque opera phyton, which was for
the opening of the new Jean-Nouvelle opera in Lyon, and there are 12 dancers, and one
of those dancers, of course, was the very handsome and cute Pascal Guy or me.
So thanks to Sylvie Scanasi and the opera de Lyon, I got to meet the love of my life,
and that's a whole other story.
At the end of the project, I get an interview at Lacroix.
I meet the head of the studio.
She's really sweet.
They seem genuinely interested, and they offer me a stache starting, I think the stache started
the end of May.
It was June, July, August, it was a three-month stache, but in the meantime, I also won a
green card in the lottery because in my two and a half years I've been in Paris, things
were really hard, and I had applied, I think, at the end of my first year, thinking maybe
New York might be, if Paris doesn't work out, maybe I should move to New York, and that
process takes a very long time, but everything sort of happened together at the same time
when I won the green card in the lottery.
In 1993, I moved to New York City, and I arrived here knowing that my future was here in America,
and it was going to be wonderful, and I had all these letters from Christian Lacroix who
was introducing me to Donna Karen, Ralph Lauren, Will Glass, Oscar de la Renta, Mark Jacobs.
Went to see Ralph Lauren, met Ralph himself in Madison Avenue in his amazing office that
was shaking like a leaf.
He's going through my portfolio, and he's nodding, and he gets to the project I did
for Dior, and it was based on a spiral staircase.
And he said, why did you choose this staircase?
I'm like, I just loved the curve, the curvilinear lines, and I loved the scroll work on the
balustrades.
He said, where did you get this image from?
I said, I tore it out of some magazine when I was living in Paris.
I don't remember.
He said, this is, that's my home, a Connecticut.
I'm like, wow, I had no idea that it was his staircase, so he's very excited.
He said, okay, I see potential here, this is great, we will be in touch with you.
I think I floated down Madison Avenue, I was like, oh my God, I'm getting a job at Ralph
Lauren.
I was so excited.
Three months later, I finally got a letter from them, a regret saying, we liked you very
much, blah, blah, blah, but no, whatever, whatever, nothing ever happened at Ralph Lauren.
So that was very disappointing.
So I was beginning to become very dissillusioned that New York wasn't working out.
I've been here six months.
I was staying with friends of the family from a woman from Ballet High who lived here who
had a monogramming business, and I was monogramming towels and shirts, the big designers I wasn't
getting anywhere, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue and looked at all the evening wear designers
that were working in New York at the time, and this young designer, Karma Mark Valvo,
had a beautiful collection at Saks Fifth Avenue, and a wonderful ad campaign that just came
out on Harper's Bazaar, and I applied to Karma Mark Valvo.
Within two weeks, I got a letter inviting me in for an interview.
So I go in for the interview and I meet with Karma's design director, who is a very funny
guy called Philip, and Philip, the reason, which I found out later, the only reason he
had me come in was because I worked at Lacroix, because Philip was a huge fan of ABFAB, the
series, the British television series that makes fun of fashion and Lacroix, and the
fact that someone had worked at Lacroix, they thought was hilarious, and they wanted to
see the guy who worked at Lacroix.
So that was the beginning of me finally getting a foothold in the fashion industry in New
York.
I remained at Karma for 10 years.
I went from being an assistant designer to a design assistant to being his creative
director.
After 10 years, I wasn't even feeling that confident in my design skills, because Karma
oversaw everything, and I wasn't really been giving the freedom to be creative, and I was
wondering if I would ever be creative enough to lead the company, or maybe I just didn't
have the skill set.
It was getting to a point where after 10 years, it was a shaky time in my career.
When I got a phone call from this incredible woman called Fran Ornstein.
Mitchell Hopps, he's an amazing young Canadian man who is a great company.
It's a partnership with his brother and Neil Featherer, the three of them.
It's Montreal-based.
They're an evening wear company in Broadway, and they just acquired the license to Bachelor
Mishka, and they've hired me to sell it, and I need a stellar designer to design it, and
you came highly recommended.
Going home in the subway that night, I'm thinking, Lord of the Rings, Frodo had a Sam Ganji,
so if I can find a Sam Ganji, I could do this.
All of a sudden, the name of Hala Mamish, who was an intern of mine at Karma Mark Valvo,
and actually we had hired her, I think she worked for us for six months or seven months
as a designer before she moved on to another company, I thought if Hala came with me, maybe
I could do this, because Hala always told me, down if ever you leave Carmen, I'll work
for Freeview out of the basement, and I started here on April 18th, which was 12 years ago.
We had so much work to do.
Hala would work from nine in the morning until three, four, and five a.m.
And somehow, I don't know how, I managed to produce a collection in time for market.
That became a huge success.
So that was three and a half years at Bachelor Mishka.
In that time, I got to be part of their runway shows, working closely with Mark and James,
got to see my dresses on the most incredible celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Natalie
Portman, Julia Roberts, and Mitchell decided it was time to renew the license and he decided
he didn't want to do it.
That Don had become successful enough, he would relinquish the Bachelor Mishka license
and start a new evening of our collection, and it was up to me to create what the collection
would be and what the brand was to be.
I was working on, I guess, a spring collection.
I had designed a white gown, a strapless gown with a very ornate jeweled belt, and the
gown was very goddess-like, and I had goddess swirling in my brain, and Thea is the Greek
for goddess.
I'm like, that's a great name for an evening wear company.
Creating a woman's inner light to shine bright is something that is very important to me,
but I didn't realize the serendipity of choosing that name, which was about light and radiance
and brilliance and everything that Thea touched.
She brought light into the world, she made gold and silver shine.
It was the perfect brand name for an evening wear company.
When we did start, it was just as the recession hit when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and
here we were starting a brand new collection that nobody really wanted, which was really,
really scary.
However, what worked in my favor was my design aesthetic was always offering the customer
wonderful value for money, and I always used beautiful couture evening fabrics, and then
used them very carefully to make them affordable and to give the customer wonderful value and
a wonderful sense of luxury at a great price, and that was the little chink that we needed,
that little, the light coming through the keyhole, which is all we needed to open the
door a little wider to give us a foothold in the market.
As the market recovered, then the business started to grow.
We also started a bridal collection, twice a season we have runway shows, and the collection
has become very successful, following along the lines of not being a traditional bridal
resource but offering something for a younger, slightly more bohemian, slightly more destination
oriented bride.
Carrie Underwood came on board very soon.
I had dressed her at Badji Mishka, and she was a loyal fan of my work, and followed us
here thankfully, and there were some wonderful collaborations.
She wore us on the rec carpet almost immediately, which was great recognition for the brand.
For the Grammys, her managers, I guess, decided they wanted to do a light show with Carrie
when she performed at the Grammys, and they needed a gown to be basically a movie screen,
and there was very specific parameters, and we had to figure out a special fabric to work
with and create a special volume on the skirt.
Two black Cadillacs, images of stars, roses, and butterflies were projected like magic
onto the dress, and more incredibly, the designer, Don O'Neill, had just days to make it.
Oprah Winfrey's marketing editor was here in the showroom looking at the third collection
and fell in love with a gold sequined gown that asked immediately if perhaps the gown
could be made for an upcoming cover shoot they were doing, which we obliged and made
the dress.
Three months later, we get a call that the gown had been photographed and would be the
cover of the September issue, which was a huge highlight in my career to have Oprah Winfrey
wearing my gown on the cover of O'Magazine.
The following February, she was nominated or was awarded an honorary Oscar, and at the
Oscars she wore the same crunchy gold sequined gown, which was incredible press for us.
So not only did she wear a teah, but it was wonderful that she wore the same dress twice,
the richest woman in the world, because she loved that dress so much, that was the dress
she wanted to wear to the Oscars.
My runway show in 2012 was a very, very special moment for me because my wonderful husband,
now my husband Pascal, had the brainwave that the show was very special and we should bring
the whole family out, and that was a very magical, magical night.
The show was inspired by Athena, the Goddess of War, and it was a very powerful show and
the girls had these incredible embroidered helmets and dramatic makeup.
My brother Patrick took this amazing picture of a sunset back in 2011.
I fell in love with it and I sent the picture to Milan to one of my print studios and they
created a print based on Patrick's sunset.
The sunset gown walked down the runway of that collection, it's an absolutely beautiful
silk organza gown.
It's something I'm very proud of, the ballet high sunset dress that has become such an
iconic piece of teah.
In 2015 I received a letter from the University College of Cork in Ireland.
I was being recognized for my achievements to Irish fashion as an inspiration to young
people in Ireland with an honorary doctorate in the arts.
I remember being in tears reading the letter and now I'm Dr Don, the Don of Fashions.
That was a huge high point for me.
Most recently another high point was being nominated for the VIP awards in Ireland and
it's a prestigious event every year that recognizes stylish and fashionable people in Ireland in
various categories and this year for the first time they added a new category, Ireland's
favorite designer.
My trophy, which I have here, to celebrate.
My journey of fashion isn't about me, it's a family and everyone about me becomes my
family and I take pride in telling people that I don't do this by myself, I'm surrounded
by incredibly talented people.
Young Victoria Wong, who sits opposite me every day, Eduardo Pereira, two incredibly
talented designers that work here in the studio with me day after day, and then I have an
incredible sales team, obviously the president of the company, Evelyn Anastas, and then of
course we have Melissa Veniero and Catherine Edwards in our PR department, Linda, who's
my incredible pattern maker, Francesca in Canada, and then my sores and my cutters here.
This whole team is very vital in making the living, breathing, functioning brand that
we are.
My career in fashion has evolved, Pascal was there for me at the very beginning, teaching
me to take one day at a time.
The love and respect we have for each other, we reflect onto everybody around us and making
things as beautiful as we know how is what we strive to do.
It has been a journey through light and I've been very, very lucky.
My wish for the future is to continue to be allowed to create that beauty and that magic
and that sense of light and to be allowed to touch even more people and to spread the
love.
That's what I'd like to do.
Create the love, share it further and just see where it takes me.
That's what I'd like to do.
That's what I'd like to do.
That's what I'd like to do.
