Abstract
As Felicity Green talked about her life on Desert Island Discs in 2011, she was asked by presenter Kirsty Young when she'd write the book. “Never,” was her reply. So this publication is a U-turn? Not really For, in truth, the book was already written, in the shape of the hundreds of pages of editorial she had produced while working for Mirror Group Newspapers from the 60s onwards.
At the time, she was a combination of associate editor, woman's editor and fashion editor of first the Sunday Mirror, and then Daily Mirror, and fortuitously (and meticulously) her work was archived by her then secretary Sheila Basten. It has simply taken the right combination of people encouraging her to sandwich a selection between elegant hard covers with added commentary The end result is a brilliant cuttings job. Literally Page after page of facsimiles of her spreads catwalk through the heady social revolution that began in the 60s. And what a walk it is: nostalgically, historically and, before anyone runs for the hills at the word “fashion”, journalistically.
This is no autobiography. Apart from her reflections on why a particular page or picture was important at the time, there's barely 30 pages of editorial and you have to hunt through those to find out how the diminutive daughter of a shoe shop owner in Dagenham rose to become the first female board director of a national newspaper. So, in the middle of a piece, “Why Style Works Better than Fashion”, we learn of Green's well turned out Jewish mother and of her father's Walk-Rite shoe shop, but not why she was inspired to write to a women's magazine for a job.
We discover, though, that the first piece of professional advice she was given by a journalist, the beautiful Phyllis Digby Morton, editor of Woman and Beauty, was “hold your stomach in” – and that she has ever since. “PDM” went on to give Green her break in journalism and maybe a lesson in iron determination and loyalty that would serve her in the years ahead. “PDM, my mentor, was a wonderful generous, remarkable woman who had many detractors and was frequently described as ‘a bitch’. I never saw it.”
Another section, “Me and the Mirror”, is breathlessly punctuated with capital letters, as in A Very Important Call from a Very Important Person – Hugh Cudlipp, then editorial director of Mirror Group – and exclamation marks: Wow! What a job! And didn't we do well! All of which would make the young aspiring journalist of today wonder how on earth you travel from being a silly me, as in “my first oops on my first day”, to being on the board. Young aspiring journalist, do not be misled. Although expressed as if in surprise, Green confides that when she met with her Very Important Person, she told him his Woman's Sunday Mirror was awful and asked to be – and was appointed – its associate editor (rather than the lowlier women's editor, which was on offer), presumably all the while holding in her stomach.
That takes guts and, for all her capital letters and exclamation marks, it is unlikely that Green, all five foot and a short ream of paper of her, knows the meaning of awe. As Mike Molloy, former editor and editor in chief of the Daily Mirror, says fondly: “Felicity had a resolve forged in stainless steel. Even when we agreed, she could still be stubborn and demanding about details. She's tiny: she's the only woman who could actually look up her nose at me.” Pity the editor who told her it wasn't suitable for women to wear trousers in the office.
Through her sheer determination to do well, Green fought for women journalists of the time, and in the future. She knew her job, she won the trust of her bosses and she challenged the (male-dominated) editorial status quo at every step. For that alone, hers is an OBE well earned.
But the great attraction of this book is reading the cuttings. They reveal a transition from a well-ordered relationship between the fashion houses and newspaper readers, with models called Enid and Mildred wearing Balmain and Laurent, and unbreakable embargos on Paris fashion week (even when Green got behind the scenes by washing hair for Vidal Sassoon) that pandered to the rich and the establishment, to a London-centric fashion scene where photographers, models and designers were given their heads. As on a rainy day in 1963, when John Cowan popped exuberant, bikini-clad model Jill Kennington on a table in a pub in Chelsea in lieu of a sun-kissed beach budget (Marks and Spencer bikini, 21 shillings).
For Green could spot the great talents as they emerged. On one Mirror page in 1964, Barbara Hulanicki, then owner of an embryonic mail order clothes business, is illustrating for Green, but by 1966 she is the subject of a double-page spread as the owner and creator of Biba, with its communal changing rooms (shock horror), absence of finished seams and 20,000 weekly shoppers. Biba's emergence is not a little down to the fact that, also in 1964, Green had got her illustrator to design an exclusive mail order pink gingham dress with matching kerchief headscarf selling at 25 shillings. Most women who were teenagers in 1964 will remember it; 17,000 of us bought it.
Along with Biba, there is Quant, Twiggy, Bailey, Shrimpton, Diana Rigg, Sandie Shaw, Terry O'Neill, Ringo, all in the ascendancy on these pages. By the end of the swinging 60s, sport was being spiced up with fashion, there were television tie-ins, “topless” clothes had been and gone, readers were being shown the effects of British fashion abroad and men's preferences were set against what women actually wanted to wear.
All of which was a million miles away from Enid and Mildred's genteel world. And these were pages as much read (or at least looked at) by men as by women. That was the revolution.