Icon du jour

Lady Lavery is one of the many unsung Irish style icons (perhaps because she was in fact an American with Anglo-Irish parents!) But what does that matter in the world of fashion. Her extraordinarily beautiful face graced our pound note and looked down at us from Sir John Lavery’s paintings at The National Gallery for long enough to have entered the Irish psyche. I have surrounded my desk with little postcards of Sir John Lavery’s paintings of her which show her demure and ethereal. But it is the E.O. Hoppe photographs that are charged with her mystic which captured the hearts and minds of the Irish politicians, most notably Michael Collins. In the image above Hazel is resplendent in a Poiret style evening coat bedecked with fur and pearls, a velvet head-piece and the ultimate accessory of “servant boy”. With so many exquisite images of her methinks a book on Lady Lavery’s wardrobe is long overdue…

See all the ‘Passion and Politics’ she evoked at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. On until 31st October 2010