What it takes to be a party queen

It's 4.30 on an icy cold Thursday afternoon and I'm sitting in the bar at Claridge's with Fiona Leahy, who is eating lobster risotto, drinking a very expensive glass of red wine and telling me about a sex talk she went to at Coco de Mer last night. She is swathed in black cashmere, wearing thigh-high Louboutin boots and has her Boudicca shearling-collared coat slung over the arm of a neighbouring chair. "Everyone is always in such a hurry these days. Sex is one of those things you should really slow down for and take your time over — I try to apply the same rule to dinner parties," she trills in her Irish lilt, lifting a forkful of risotto to her lips.

Leahy is not your average party planner and she doesn't "do" average events. From Dita Von Teese's wedding to Marilyn Manson in a Gothic castle in Ireland to music producer Mark Ronson's birthday party and an intimate dinner for the Olsen sisters in London, over the past few years she has lent her unique brand of opulence and artisan je ne sais quoi to some of the hippest and most stellar parties.

In this month's issue of Vogue her name was mentioned 17 times (for her origami creations at Louis Vuitton and designer-studded haberdashery gathering at Harvey Nichols during Fashion's Night Out, to name but two) and when Tamara Mellon celebrated her OBE in October with a dinner for her closest friends (complete with hand-made snakeskin napkin rings) it was Fiona she turned to.

Always über-glam — you'll never find this party planner running around in jeans and Uggs — she has also enchanted the likes of Prince Pavlos of Greece, the Qatari royal family and Dasha Zhukova. And, like Chinese whispers, word
continues to spread. Having grown up in Tipperary in a small hotel owned by her parents, "where I first got a taste for hospitality", Fiona moved to New York when she was 21 with dreams of breaking into the fashion industry. With luck clearly on her side, she was soon assisting the
legendary runway show producer Kevin Krier and working with Patti Wilson, the American editor of I.D. magazine, on shoots with Terry
Richardson and David La-Chapelle.

"It was an amazing time," she says breezily, "but I always knew that working solely in fashion wasn't my true vocation."

On her return to London five years later, a friend of Fiona's who was assisting Kate Moss suggested she contact Jade Jagger, who was looking for a Girl Friday. The pair hit it off and when Jagger was employed to revamp the image of Garrard's the jewellers, Fiona went too. She eventually became assistant creative director for the brand, designing everything from jewellery to the decadent windows and events that were held in the shop.

Entranced by a clip of Dita Von Teese doing her martini-glass striptease, Fiona invited the up-and-coming burlesque star to perform instore.

It was her first ever London performance, which she now credits with properly launching her career, and not long after that, Fiona found herself planning Dita's wedding to indie rocker Marilyn Manson in the very same Irish county she grew up in.

The Victoriana wedding, with its 4,000 blood-red roses, black glassware and monogrammed everything, was featured in American Vogue and Fiona started to realise that it was no longer feasible to work out of her dressing room at home, where she had "Louboutins falling on my head while I was trying to do budgets and proposals".

These days she is somewhat more professionally ensconced in an office-cum-studio in Kensal Rise, surrounded by assistants, her "chief prop master" Riley (a wily Parson Russell terrier she rescued) and a proliferation of whatever the team are creating for Fiona's next event, from gold pinatas one week to personalised snow globes the next: "It's all about abundance."