At home with...Sonia Reynolds

During her reign as one of Ireland’s busiest and best-known fashion models, Sonia Reynolds travelled the world, strutting her stuff on the catwalks of fashion capitals such as Milan, Tokyo and New York. These days, her life is far less hectic and the mother-of-three now spends more time attending to domestic duties. Not that she’s left the fashion world behind. She is the founder and a current director of Motorola Dublin Fashion Week, a twice-yearly event, and she also runs a PR/event company which deals mostly with clients in the fashion and lifestyle area.

The world of modelling, especially at the highest level, is seen by many as the ultimate glamour career choice. Looking back on her years in the spotlight, she says it more than lived up to her expectations.
“I spent 14 years modelling and I can honestly say that I loved every single moment of it,” she says. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t really expect it to happen to me. When it did, I just grabbed it and ran with it. It was hard work, of course. You spent what seemed like your whole life travelling. It’s not for everyone and it depends on your personality. I was based in the States for a while and if I got a bit homesick, I’d come home for a while.”
Though she grew up in Lurgan, Co Armagh, home for Sonia these days is the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathgar, where she’s lived for over three years. “We were living in rented accommodation and were looking around for a long time before we eventually came across this one,” she explains. “It was a typical old Rathgar red-bricked house, but it had been divided into seven bedsits, like a lot of properties in the area. It took almost a year to convert it back to the way it was originally and to make it more suitable for our own needs. We had to move in before the work was finished and it happened to be the day before Christmas Eve. That was a bit hectic.”
Sonia shares the house with husband Barry and her three young children – Charlie, Lily and Polly, aged eight, six and four respectively. With three kids so young, it’s a busy household to say the least. “I suppose they are close in age and it was hard work when they were all a bit younger. But we’re feeling a bit smug now that they’re all in school and we have a bit more time to ourselves.”
Living close to the city, she says, is perfect for someone in her line of work. “It can turn out to be more expensive as far as the price of property is concerned, but in the long term it pays off. We had even thought of moving out to the country at one stage, but everything we do would have turned into a big production. Getting around would have been a major problem. From here, I can walk or even cycle into town in no time and the kids go to school up the road in Rathmines.”
Presumably, her social life isn’t as hectic as it was back in her modelling days? “We would tend to entertain at home a lot. I would host a lot of supper parties, with friends dropping in. It’s pretty informal and usually great craic. I’m big on food and we’d experiment quite a bit. We’ve a few pals living around the country and we often visit them at the weekends, packing the whole family into the car.”
Apart from the kids, her pride and joy is clearly the Motorola Dublin Fashion Week, which started from small beginnings to become a major biannual event, taking place once for the autumn-winter and once for the spring-summer collections. As well as being a designers’ showcase, it hosts ‘The Talks’, a series of speaker events which attract key figures in the fashion industry. Along with Motorola, it is now supported by Dublin City Enterprise Board, Lancome, Brown Thomas and Lyons Kenny Solicitors.
“The fashion week idea was an amalgamation of everything that I had done up to then,” she says. “I didn’t go to college and I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do when the modelling ended. But it opened up a lot of other chapters for me. I was interested in events and ran a few things, then I started working with PR companies, doing things like the Red Bull Flugtag. The first Fashion Week, we did without any sponsorship, just relying on people doing us favours and then lots of people came on board. It’s been going strong now for three and a half years, and it just gets better.”

The next Motorola Dublin Fashion Week takes place in Spring/Summer 2009