'I am like Don Quixote'

Covadonga O'Shea is one of the most powerful figures in the Spanish fashion industry, a best-selling author and a self-confessed member of Opus Dei. DEIRDRE MCQUILLANmeets her in Madrid

One of the best known and most powerful figures in the Spanish fashion industry Covadonga O’Shea pioneered the country’s best-selling glossy magazine Telva and founded ISEM, a respected fashion business school in Madrid, the first of its kind in Spain. From a well-known family in Vizcaya, her ancestors were Irish soldiers and bankers. She recalled her Irish roots earlier this year when, at the invitation of director Breege O’Donoghue, she opened Primark’s new store outside Madrid, its 26th in Spain.

When we met for dinner at the popular Ten Con Ten restaurant in the upmarket Barrio de Salamanca neighbourhood of Madrid, her arrival was greeted with a flurry of attention and handshakes and she confided that the owner was a former pupil of her school. It was immediately obvious that she is popular and respected, her easy manner with people warm and unselfconscious.

On first-name terms with every fashion designer you can think of, she was the only journalist ever to interview the notoriously publicity shy owner of Zara, Amancio Ortega and her book about the founder of Inditex The Man from Zara went into seven editions when it was published this year and has sold more than 100,000 copies. It was her ninth book.

“I felt I had to write it,” she said. “And I never let myself be put off by his remorseless refusals. I argued that being one of the richest men in the world didn’t explain anything fundamental about him.” She told me that she first met Ortega in 1990 when she was invited to the Inditex headquarters in La Coruna in northwest Spain. Since then she has built up an extraordinarily close relationship with a man whom she describes as a visionary. Many of her students find employment in the company, now the largest in Spain.

“He is like Balenciaga and I can make a connection between them because Balenciaga was as much informed by his times as Ortega is by his.” The book is soon to be launched in the US and she wants to update the next edition to include Zara’s online development and increasing globalisation. “It’s is now in five continents and I’ve been to Shanghai and seen it in Plaza 66 where it is placed in front of the world’s luxury companies.”

A slim, vibrant woman in her late 60s with bright eyes and a quick smile who uses her hands expressively in a very Spanish way, she is a well-known writer, author and self-confessed member of Opus Dei.

“My religion is as natural to me as cooking at home,” she says. “I have never regretted my decision [to join] and nobody influenced me. I was 20 at the University of Navarra [where she was the first to graduate with a degree in philosophy and communications] and decided against all the odds and its bad press”, she told El Mundo. She had been engaged to be married with her trousseau ready “and initialled”, when she decided on another life.

She comes from a well connected, diverse and interesting family. Her sister Paloma is a celebrated pianist and founder of an internationally famous piano competition. Two years ago she was promoted to Marchioness O’Shea by King Juan Carlos for her contribution to the musical culture of the country. Married to billionaire Emilio Botin, president of Bank Santander, Europe’s biggest bank, their daughter Ana Patricia, Spain’s first female banking chief (described by the Financial Times as one of the most powerful women in Europe), is head of Santander in the UK. Their other daughter Carmen is the former wife of the late golfing legend Seve Ballesteros.

O’Shea lights up when talking about her sister whom she resembles in appearance and to whom she is very close. She often borrows Paloma’s stylish clothes. Her sister, she explains, has seven children and divides her time between Santander and Madrid “and has a very nice house in Santander”. The following day I saw “the very nice house” on a guided tour of Santander, a huge mansion on a hill overlooking the city just below the royal palace.

Born into a bourgeois Basque family in Vizcaya, O’Shea is one of seven children of José O’Shea Sebastian and Maria Artinano from Bilbao. O’Shea was called after a small but important village in the Asturias, the site of famous battle against the Moors but which also had family associations. Her mother’s brother was killed there during the Spanish civil war.

“At the time it was a strange thing to call someone Covadonga, but now it has become more popular, though people shorten it to Cova, but I love my name,” she adds. “And Covadonga is such a beautiful place in the mountains. The name means the Cave of Our Lady.”

Schooled in the Sacred Heart in Bilbao, she remembers her Irish nanny from Taylor’s Hill in Galway and going to visit her when she was 16 on her first trip to Ireland “and how cold the water was”. Her second time in Ireland was on the inaugural Aer Lingus flight from Madrid to Dublin but she has not been back since.

“My father was fourth generation Irish and he always used to say we have an apostrophe in our name because we are Irish, yet he was very Spanish and fought with Franco in the civil war in the Pyrenees. He was later jailed.”

Her brother, Ignacio, was trained by the Jesuits. He was also jailed but for very different political views. A member of Eta and Batasuna, he was prosecuted for his political activities and jailed for civil disobedience. It was a huge heartbreak for her mother, she says.

The family connections go back to an Irish soldier called Henry O’Shea who became one of the most important bankers in 19th century Spain and was the founder of the Banesto bank which, in an ironic twist of fate, was later acquired by Emilio Botin. Covadonga’s father was an engineer and his cousin José Sebastian de Erice O’Shea was the Spanish ambassador to the UN in 1955.

O’Shea’s professional career started as a journalist and when she founded Telva, she wanted it to be “not just about clothes but about modern, intelligent women and their lives” – a ground-breaking idea in conservative Spain of the 1970s.

“Fashion is an expression of society and what is happening. Now it is informed by young people, by TV, by the images they see and today they are full of images and fashion follows the time. But can you define these days what is in and what is out?” she asks rhetorically. “Fashion is close to women and children and society and has changed more in the last 10 years than in a whole century. Everything is upside down now.”

Spanish people don’t associate Ireland with fashion, she says, but adds that “young people here are crazy about Primark. You should see the queues. Fashion can buttress the image of a country where it is designed. It is the engine behind great financial empires; it creates thousands of jobs and has always been an accurate reflection of what is happening in society. Anatole France once said that if he were to return to earth a century after his death, he would ask for a fashion magazine to get his bearings.”

During her tenure at the helm of Telva, a post she held for 27 years, she interviewed people from the worlds of fashion, politics and culture, from Armani, Versace and Galliano to Golda Meir and Artur Rubinstein.

Donna Karan impressed her greatly. Though she has now relinquished control, the current issue has an article in her Más que Moda (More than Fashion) column describing a visit to the White House in 1970 and her view of Michelle Obama.

Since its foundation 12 years ago, her school has attracted some 600 people from all over the world to its MBA courses and is now part of the University of Navarra. “They learn everything about the fashion business, about production, distribution, marketing as well as the relationship between fashion and anthropology, culture, art and history.”

On a short tour of her school with its cool, modern glass interior in the centre of Madrid, I meet one of the students, Blanca Moro from Madrid whose thesis is on creativity and control in fashion companies. The school, O’Shea feels, will be her legacy.

I suggest that she should write a history of the O’Sheas in Spain, but she has more progressive ideas. Her latest is to create a joint venture uniting business and creative talent.

“I dream about creating a school not just about fashion, but for those who have creative talents for everything and to connect them with industry. I would love to promote this in a global sense, but this is my Irish side, always dreaming. I am like Don Quixote and I am a descendant not only of Irish people, but of Don Quixote,” she says with a broad smile.

The latest trend: Spain and Ireland

Penneys/Primark, which has links with Covadonga O’Shea’s ISEM, is fostering a strong working relationship between Spain and Ireland. Their presence is increasing at a time of record unemployment in Spain. There were 21,000 applications for 190 Primark jobs in Alicante, for example, and more than one million applications since 2006. This year the company will have created 2,000 jobs in Spain, more than any other retail company in the country.

Two MBA students of ISEM worked in the Dublin office of Penneys last year and currently a Penney’s student is doing an MBA in Madrid. Primark stepped up its European expansion again this month with the opening of its 35th store in Spain, in Santander, and Karlsrühe in Germany bringing the total number of its European stores to 252 with a total workforce of 43,900.

In Santander, the store opening was conducted by the president of the Cantabria region and a 90,000 sq ft flagship store is due to open in central Madrid in early 2014. “We do business the local way and work with the communities,” says director Breege O’Donoghue.