“I have no time for big egos.”
From reinventing Arnotts to retail to lessons from Karl Lagerfeld, fashion industry veteran Eddie Shanahan talks to Marie Kelly about his 40-year career and explains why Ireland has an important role to play in international fashion.
Eddie Shanahan describes his career as a series of happy accidents. Luck certainly plays a part in most stellar careers, but listening to him colourfully recount his 40-odd-year journey in fashion and retail, I’m reminded of that salient Thomas Jefferson quote: “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
As chairman of the Council of Irish Fashion Designers with a private consultancy that encapsulates fashion and retail supports, product development, education, and event management and production, Shanahan knows more about what’s happening in Irish design than anybody. His behind-the-scenes persona belies the leading-man energy he has brought to his role and he remains an integral character in the story of how Ireland has reimagined itself from an outlying island known for its Aran sweaters to a purveyor of luxury fashion.
Through the decades, he’s undertaken any number of challenges; he reinvented fashion show production in the 1970s, calling time on “models walking like hens in the rain” and injecting shows with a modern dynamism and energy; he cofounded a model agency to improve the lot of girls in the industry and ran it for 15 years; he was instrumental in reinventing Arnotts as a destination department store with luxury labels in the late 1990s; and he developed the Create initiative alongside Brown Thomas 14 years ago to identify the best in Irish design talent with the potential to sell in-store. While this barely scratches the surface of his legacy to date, he’s keen to talk about his current mission, which is to educate people about sustainable fashion and the real meaning of value, which he insists is not only about price. The work starts with children at primary school level, he believes. “Show me the boy and I’ll show you the man,” asserts Shanahan.
The north county Dublin resident is, himself, a case in point. Shanahan’s earliest memories are of his father dressing for a hunt. “Not very politically correct now,” he admits, “but back then it was a fact of life.” Each of his father’s hunting jackets was made in Callaghan’s on Dame Street. “I remember the way he tied his hunting stock and the pins he used, how he’d polish the brass buttons on his jacket. He would always put boot trees inside his leather boots when he arrived home before cleaning and drying them.” There was a ritualistic element to how he dressed and Shanahan explains that this had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with respect. “From a very young age, I was exposed to high-quality fabrics and taught to appreciate them,” he explains.
Children need to be taught the essence of value, which is not about price alone but about design, craftsmanship, construction, quality of fabrics and finish. Ireland is ten years behind the curve.
He feels strongly that the younger generation has been brainwashed by fast fashion retailers. “When Shein came to Dublin, they queued around the bloody block to get the stuff,” he says with audible frustration. “They’ve been conditioned into ordering five packages to arrive on a Friday; they keep one and send four back on Monday.” Shanahan believes children must learn to look after clothes; they need to be taught the essence of value, which is not about price alone but about design, craftsmanship, construction, quality of fabrics and finish. “Ireland is ten years behind the curve on this,” he remarks.
For a man known as a forecaster of trends and a predictor of new directions, his upbringing was surprisingly earthy and outdoorsy. He was born in Durrow in Co Laois, but the family moved to Clonmel in Co Tipperary when he was three to live with his grandfather after his father suffered a devastating riding accident that broke every bone in his body. During what Shanhan describes as “a semi-miraculous recovery”, his son enjoyed walks in the Comeragh mountains and picnics by the river Suir. He recounts one precious memory of finding a pregnant foxhound who’d strayed from her home the day before curled up with her litter of pups in a hollowed-out tree.
The family moved to north county Dublin when he was five, as rural then as the small town he’d left behind, complete with a local farming community, and so his enchantment with the outdoors continued. He always imagined it would form the backdrop of any future career until a part-time job at Arnotts during his school holidays led to a management trainee course there, which he didn’t initially want, but accepted after he passed the entrance exam. This unexpectedly led to a scholarship for a summer school in marketing at Oxford University, and it was here that a fire was lit in his belly for retail that has never been quashed. On returning home, his boss recommended he apply for an upcoming assistant manager’s role, advising Shanahan to “come in tomorrow looking more like an executive than a rock star”. “So I got my hair cut and I got the job,” Shanahan explains.
After almost five decades of navigating every nuance of the industry at all levels, Shanahan intriguingly remarks, “I can smell new-season colours and prints. I can walk into a trade fair and predict what I’ll see, be that olive green or checks.” He says this comes from a broad ability to read, absorb and recall information without bias. He consumes Architectural Digest and biographies and his favourite weekend pastime is reading “Lunch with…” in the Financial Times on a Saturday. “That interview could be with a Chinese businessman, it doesn’t matter; I’ll always find something to underline and take away from it.” He also pays attention to the way people live their lives. “I love nothing more than to be in a room with a mix of people – a designer, a ceramicist, a woodturner, an artist – because we all learn from each other.”
Good fortune may have played a hand in Shanahan’s career – hard work certainly has – but his achievements are also undoubtedly down to his humility, relatability and openness. He believes staunchly that nobody has the right to be arrogant, a lesson he learned from none other than the late Karl Lagerfeld. “I was marketing executive at the International Wool Secretariat in the mid-1980s and I wrote to Lagerfeld to ask if he would come to Dublin to judge a student design competition – he had won a similar competition in Paris several years earlier. This was when his star was really on the rise and he already had armies of people working for him,” Shanahan explains. Although the event clashed with the launch of Lagerfeld’s menswear collection in the US, the Chanel creative director sent Shanahan a handwritten note to say he was unavailable. “This man, who was one of the busiest people in fashion, took the time to write to someone he didn’t know and had never heard of. It was a superb learning curve,” he says. “I don’t have time for big egos,” he states.
Shanahan says he’s leveraged this learning and it’s served him well when sitting at some of the most influential tables in the industry – at home, in Europe and beyond. “We each deserve to be in the room and to collaborate; nobody has the right to tell anybody else what to do. I firmly believe Ireland has a role to play in international fashion.” He works with global embassies, from Beijing to New Mexico, the European Fashion Alliance, as well as Enterprise Ireland and the National Design Forum. “But I’m not naive, Irish designers need to deliver.” He namechecks Éadach by Sara O’Neill, Róisín Pierce and Caoimhe Dowling as just some of the creatives following in the footsteps of the likes of Simone Rocha and carving out a space on the international fashion stage by harnessing Ireland’s heritage.
“Fashion in this country used to be something a government minister looked to when he wanted a photocall with some pretty girls that would make the front page of the newspapers. Now it’s become part of our culture and the department of foreign affairs is promoting it as such.” He’s adamant we need to grab the opportunity with both hands and deliver. He’s also resolute about the need to preserve traditional crafts and says it’s very much a European concern not just an Irish one. He speaks evocatively of the artisans he’s witnessed over the years, from shoemakers in the Brenta Riviera – the heart of the Italian shoemaking district between Padua and Venice – to seamstresses in Cremona in Italy hand-stitching tweed and chiffon and running them over with a warm iron until the threads melt away fusing the two fabrics effortlessly together.
The conversation comes back around to quality fabrics time and again. Shanahan has a passion for them. He prizes his Smyth & Gibson shirts, the cashmere he occasionally buys from Monaghans as a treat and the suits he has made to measure by Joseph Martin in Sligo. “They’re like a second skin; they just make me feel good.” He very much practises the “fewer but better” mantra he’s preaching and he believes consumers can do the same without having to sacrifice self-expression. “Sure, express your personality through clothes,” he encourages, “just don’t change your personality every week,” he finishes wryly.
Originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, July 2024