As “Felicity Green on the Fashion Scene”, the self-styled fashion journalist who has died aged 100, introduced a new younger female readership to the idea that fashion could be fun, funky and more financially accessible than the haute couture of the 1950s.
The 1960s had dawned with new designers aiming at less monied customers who had youth and attitude on their side. And it turned Felicity Green into the most influential fashion editor of her day. In her role as associate editor at the Daily Mirror she would eventually become executive women’s editor of all the Mirror’s titles, and in 1973 the first woman to be appointed to the board of a national newspaper.
Her timing was fortunate, for there were rich pickings to be had. This was the era of Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant – and the transformative Biba look that she helped launch in the mid 1960s. Biba was born in the shape of a £3 pink gingham dress design with matching headscarf that Green had commissioned from designer Barbara Hulanicki, and promoted in a double-page spread in early 1964. She anticipated it would raise a maximum 3,000 mail orders, but was stunned when it reached 17,000. That pink dress generated the opening of the first Biba boutique on Abingdon Road, Kensington followed by a five-storey shop on Kensington High Street. The stores celebrated a high gothic vibe with nonchalant shop assistants wearing black lipstick and thick eyeliner, where customers were free to explore at ease.
Green herself was no true fashionista. With her fluffy bob and serious expression, she admitted to never having been fashionable. “Fashion,” she averred, “needs to be followed at a very, very respectful distance. My blueprint for fashion is to be simple and stylish.” As the market moved away from exorbitant high-end fashion, young people flocked to Biba.
Upcoming photographers such as David Bailey shot cover spreads in black and white. Green designed her own pages choosing the balance between text and photos. Her articles, she insisted, made fashion “relate to your life, to your money, to your attitudes, to your prejudices, to your pleasures”.
She did not see herself as simply a fashion editor, more an observer of street fashion, which reflected perceptible changes in society; the clothes worn on a shopping spree or on a night out, the choice of haircut. And she could be quite acerbic in defining her role: “Fashion is not a bloody religion, as most fashion editors seem to think it is,” was her comment on the publication of her 2014 memoir, Sex, Sense and Nonsense: Felicity Green on the ‘60s Fashion Scene. “It’s about people,” she insisted. The book featured the best examples of her Daily Mirror fashion pages, conveying her view, revolutionary in her day, that fashion should be for everybody.
However, it was not always an easy ride. Cecil King, chair of publishing group IPC, of which the Mirror was then a part, was incandescent at seeing mini-skirts and trouser suits on her pages and threatened to sack her. “How long are you going to continue to put those ridiculous clothes in my newspaper?” he roared. “Can you imagine the wife of a Sheffield bus-driver wearing that?” But Mirror Group chair Hugh Cudlipp trusted her enough to give her the Mirror’s front page “to tell our readers what the Swinging Sixties are all about”.
That front page of her book was a special souvenir issue of the Mirror in which Green’s headline was “64: The Year That Changed all our lives.” After political references to Khrushchev’s dismissal and China’s atomic bomb, it continued: “Skirts got shorter, boys’ hair got longer, smart girls wore the trousers, the topless went bust and the Beatles went everywhere.”
Meanwhile, at home Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power, and for a pre-election dinner with Cudlipp, Green was asked to perm Mary Wilson’s hair, for which she was rewarded with a thank you poem from Mary. But Green was not immune to sexist taunts and jibes. Press Gazette called her “the first director to powder her nose before a board meeting” and worse would follow. Green rose above such misogyny with a polite smile, until her discovery in 1978 that a new male board member received more than twice her salary proved a step too far. She resigned before becoming managing director of Vidal Sassoon, helping launch Working Woman magazine and counselling the boards of the Express, the Telegraph and M&S Magazine. She then took up a senior lectureship role at St Martin’s College of Art and Design.
In 2011, in her mid 80s, she was invited by The Observer to write on fashion for mature ladies. For this series Audrey Hepburn was her role model. Green was appointed OBE for services to journalism in 2012.
Felicity Green was born in Dagenham, east London, to Jewish parents, Annie and Emanuel Green, who lived above a bike shop. An only child, she grew up in poverty and in difficult circumstances caused by parental tensions owing to her mother’s deafness. Green tried to mitigate between her parents. Her shared love of cinema with her father sparked her interest in the fashion styles of 1930s Hollywood stars. She began designing her own dresses at the age of 14. She was educated at Clark’s College, Ilford and took the obligatory shorthand typing route for girls of her era – where she described herself as “the worst pupil Pitman ever had” and became a secretary at Woman & Beauty Magazine in the 1940s, where the editor taught her correct deportment, treated her as the office dogsbody but promoted her to fashion editor within two years.
After a spell at WS Crawford advertising agency she was offered a job by Cudlipp on Woman’s Sunday Mirror later absorbed into Woman Magazine. She became associate editor at the Daily Mirror in 1961, where the editor, Lee Howard gave her tough advice on dealing with recalcitrant males unused to a woman boss; “You will have to give them a bollocking from time to time but do it gracefully and always let him leave your room with his balls intact.” It stood her in good stead throughout her career. In a letter to The Guardian following Green’s death, a former colleague, Felicity Lawrence, described her as “witty, stylish, direct and a marketing genius”. She added: “As well as passing on the now famous tip that if you wanted to win an argument with a more senior male ego, best not to chew their balls off....’ You need to be a crab, darling, you’ll get much further if you come at things side ways, so people don’t see you coming.’”
Green was married for 40 years to businessman Geoffrey Hill, who predeceased her in 1992, but they had no children. She feared she would not make a good mother. During her Desert Island Discs appearance in 2011, she admitted that she would have loved grandchildren.
GLORIA TESSLER
Felicity Green: born June 26, 1926. Died: September 10, 2026
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