In the mythical age of bohemia, the psychedelic decade between Mary Quant’s cheerful miniskirts and the first snarls of punk, Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark were London’s most fashionable couple. Birtwell created the fabrics: daydreamy, botanical doodles that captured the idealism and looseness of the times in wisps of chiffon. Clark magicked these into sensual bias-cut dresses with a freewheeling grandeur that was part Hollywood glamour, part rock’n’roll anarchy.
More than just designers, they were a whole vibe. They dressed – and partied with – the innermost of the in-crowd. Talitha Getty, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg hung out at Quorum, their Chelsea boutique.
At a catwalk show in 1970, there were two Beatles, Cecil Beaton and Brigitte Bardot in the audience – and, after Clark began making stage clothes for Mick Jagger, he accompanied the Rolling Stones on tour. David Hockney’s portrait of the couple in their pomp – Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, painted two years into their marriage, when Birtwell was pregnant with their second child – sealed their place in the mythology of the period. Spoiler alert: stories of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll tend not to have happy endings.
The couple split in 1974 after five years of marriage, and Clark descended into addiction and bankruptcy long before his death at 54, brutally murdered in his west London flat by an ex-boyfriend. But their partnership, and the sumptuous clothes they made together, is enjoying another moment in the sun with a new exhibition, Ossie Clark + Celia Birtwell, about to open at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum. These days Celia Birtwell does a terrific impression of being just a sweet old lady.
In fact she is so convincing that although she mentions, chatting to me on the phone from her kitchen in Shepherd’s Bush, that she has been doing a few bits and pieces in fashion lately, she is so low-key that I don’t think much of it. It is only a few weeks later, when I am at Burberry’s London fashion week show and she is sitting opposite me, that it turns out “a few bits and pieces” involved co-designing the entire catwalk collection with Daniel Lee, the creative director of Britain’s biggest luxury brand. Do not be fooled by the mild-mannered image: Birtwell is, and always has been, a player.
The 85-year-old chats amiably about her grandchildren, the garden of her Shropshire cottage, and the struggles of having fine hair. I have little plastic ones now because Carmen rollers, which I had for years, bloody burn my poor hair.” She was always the calm, blue-eyed yin to Clark’s rakish, hedonistic yang. They met as art students when she was 19, introduced in a Manchester coffee bar by a mutual friend who wanted to show her a “really mad boy”.
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