Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. My next guest is an entrepreneur and social impact advocate. Sonia Lennon is with me now for What Made Me. Sonia, you're so welcome. Thank you for having me. Lovely to have you with us. So we want to know all about how you got to where you are today and where it all started.
But you were always, even from a teeny, teeny tot, interested in fashion and design, weren't you?
Oh, yeah, I have still have notebooks full of my fashion creations from probably about the age of 10. Horrendous now, absolutely horrendous, but they still exist.
I'm sure they were lovely.
Well, they were kind of sexy aliens. So, yeah, so just, and I used to get fizzy watching fashion television and seeing international catwalks and kind of always felt that was the direction of travel. And what did the family think of this as an option for you growing up? Well, my mom was a transatlantic cabin crew for Aer Lingus. So she had very international references, cultural references.
So she was I mean, she loved shopping in New York back in the day. And yeah, so so we had like we had a lot of stuff before other people like I was the first kid I knew who had leg warmers.
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Chapter 2: How did Sonya Lennon first become interested in fashion?
And the halo effect of that to my wider group was kind of amazing. So I got to sense what it felt like to feel good about how you look and how it positively impacts those around you. So when you said you wanted to work in this area. Yeah, they said no. They were like, oh, well, we don't know if you can make a career at that. But I pursued. Would you look at the civil service maybe?
Exactly.
Well, it wasn't quite that, but they definitely had dreams of me going to university because neither of them had. And then circumstances went against me. I applied for fashion in NCAD. I had a couple of insurance policy arts courses on there as well. And I left school, went to Loretta on the Green in 1986. I was my leaving year and that was the year of the fire that tragically killed six nuns.
And a lesser side effect of that was that the art room burnt down and all of our portfolios were gone. So I couldn't apply to art college. So I just said, I kind of thumbed my nose at it and I said, I'm going to work in luxury fashion retail. And that's what I did. That's what you did.
So where did that take you then? Look. You did that for a while.
Yeah, I did that for a few years. I worked with really avant-garde stores like Vivian Walsh's Camouflage, which was on Dawson Street where Marco Pierre White's is now, and Forenze that was at the base of the Westbury Hotel. It was the time when There was a store called Tokyo on South End Street.
It was very, very early doors, international collections, very avant-garde, way ahead of its time, those founders of those stores. But I absolutely loved it. And then I discovered styling and I thought, wow, this is an opportunity to paint something pictures with clothes and that felt really potent to me So you became a personal stylist then?
No not at all a commercial fashion stylist so I would work on fashion campaigns or music videos or TV commercials and travel around the world doing gorgeous work and painting pictures with clothes and coming together like a circus creating a campaign and then moving on so I was a freelance fashion stylist It was fabulous Sounds like a lovely life It was so much fun Especially at that stage of your life
Yeah, and it was Dublin in the 90s, which was pretty much like the funnest thing you could possibly imagine. So like flying on private jets to music festivals with bands and backstage and guerrilla gigs with David Bowie and all that kind of stuff. It was amazing. Living the dream. Living the dream. But then opportunity knocked again, didn't it?
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Sonya face in pursuing a career in fashion?
Now, in fairness, they'd done a huge amount of work to get to the point where they were and to be right for the show. Yes. But for us to then layer on top of that a sense of permission to say, you can feel good about yourself. That's what they needed.
So the other work then, that was a very wise choice then to take that gig at the time. Yeah. But how did it change your life? Completely.
Completely. Because I saw the kind of democratisation of what I had been doing. Whereas I'd been working at a very kind of niche, elite level. I saw then, well, actually, if you give this gift to people, general people, it can change their lives. And it did. Like we begged for revisit shows because people would fundamentally change their lives after that moment in the mirror.
They'd leave no good fiancƩs. They'd buy camper vans. They'd set up businesses. They'd go travelling. All this great stuff happened because they were empowered. They had empowered themselves and given themselves permission to thrive. So then I thought, well, I that's kind of amazing. And I started getting pulled into kind of working to support charities and nonprofits and stuff like that.
And it was all a bit haphazard. And I thought, well, actually, I come from privilege. I always have a double privilege of not wanting for anything, but also being loved and trusted by the family that created me. And I think that's a solid gold gift that I have an opportunity to kind of leverage and use in a way that can help others. And I read about Dress for Success, which was kind of like...
grassroots makeovers. It was like, get out into the trenches, see the women who really, really need support, give them the permission, the tools, the clothing, the guidance to get sustainable careers, moving towards economic independence. And then that changes everything. And I was initially attracted to children's charities because I thought they're the most vulnerable in our society.
And I read a piece of research, a very depressing piece of research, which I've been pilloried for before, but I'm going to say it again. The research said antisocial behaviour is directly linked to low self-esteem of the mother. Now, that is pushing the blame on the mother in one way, but it's also saying if you support the mother, you support the whole family dynamic and the community dynamic.
And we've seen that play out.
So then and I'll tell you what I at the time I remember Dress for Success being set up and what I understood it to be was helping people to get ready for the working world for the job interview by giving them the clothes which gave them the confidence to sit down and answer the questions that were being asked of them. Is that what that was ultimately?
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Chapter 4: What was Sonya's experience working in luxury fashion retail?
Exactly. And that wasn't the message that we wanted to put out there. But also kind of from an administrative point of view, we were bound to dress for success Dublin and we knew we had to serve the whole country. And the terms of our license agreement with New York didn't allow for that. And they couldn't understand how Ireland would need
A country agency because they think in different scale to us, you know. So we broke away from them, called it work equal and also dress for success. Men were allergic to it because they felt it was a kind of a woman's thing. Whereas now we've had so much more men involved in it. in both funding and service delivery. Our board is 50-50, all of that kind of stuff.
And so now we get out into the regions, we hit town with a truck full of clothing, a gang of HR volunteers and career guides, and we can serve up to 200 women. in a sitting, individually bespoke to their needs.
And last week, WorkEqual won a great award, the Newstalk Changemakers overall prize, which I'm sure you were very proud to receive.
Well, we won two, actually. We won our category, which was inclusive workplaces, and then nobody was more surprised than us to win the overall award because our team is tiny. And, you know, I'm not operationally involved. I founded it, I was on the board. There's a team of four that create an infrastructure for We've served almost 10,000 women back into work at this stage since we began.
And those numbers are growing year on year. I'm so incredibly happy for the team and proud of what they've achieved. So there's that part of you, the social entrepreneur, but then you keep the design side alive as well, don't you? Well, I do, but how I frame design now in my life has very much changed.
So I suppose about three years ago, I realised with a bit of an epiphany that I was much more interested in concepts, positive impact and social change than I was in stuff. So where I keep my design alive now is... In designing social change and social reform.
So I suppose when I look at what has happened through Work Equal and I look at the evolution of those women that we've served and my own evolution, right? So I'm going to be 58 at the end of this year. I now see that the biggest challenge to workplace equity is the sort of invisible and taboo subject of ageism in the workplace. Right. Tell me about it. What do you see?
I see that there is a cloak of invisibility that falls over people once they hit kind of 50, maybe mid-50. There are plenty of firms that are pretty blatant about the fact that, you know... You end at 50, your career ends at 50 or 55 in this particular sector. That's just the way it rolls. But actually, we are an ageing population.
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