Felicity Green obit

Felicity Green, trailblazing fashion journalist who helped launch the Biba look in the 1960s

 

She was not on the list.

Felicity Green, who has died aged 100, was the most influential fashion editor of the 1960s and the first woman to be appointed to the board of a national newspaper.

As fashion editor of the Daily Mirror at a time when the paper was selling more than five million copies a day, “Felicity Green on the fashion scene” was one of the first to write about Twiggy and Mary Quant and was instrumental in launching the Biba look which swept all before it in the mid-1960s.

It was in 1964 that she asked Barbara Hulanicki, who had previously worked as a fashion illustrator on the Mirror and was now running a small mail-order company, to design a dress as an offer for readers. She promoted the outfit, a gingham dress and matching headscarf costing less than £3, in a full-page spread, expecting it to win 3,000 orders at best.

When 17,000 orders came flooding in, the Biba look was born. Soon, Biba opened its first boutique on Abingdon Road in Kensington and within five years it had opened a five-storey department store on Kensington High Street – a temple of fashion noted for its decadent atmosphere and languid sales assistants in black lipstick and green nail varnish.

Felicity Green followed a clear philosophy. Eschewing the high-end Paris collections, she wrote features in which fashion related to ordinary people’s lives, budgets and even attitudes. She herself, she explained, had never been fashionable: “Fashion needs to be followed at a very, very respectful distance. My blueprint for fashion is to be simple and stylish.”

Not everyone was impressed, however. Cecil King, chairman of the post-war Daily Mirror, once threatened to fire Felicity Green for running a feature on mini-skirts, expostulating: “How long are you going to continue to put those ridiculous clothes in my newspaper? Can you imagine the wife of a Sheffield bus-driver wearing that?” But it was King who was later fired.

Felicity Green was eventually promoted to be executive women’s editor across all three Mirror group titles and in 1973 was appointed publicity director, becoming, in the words of a trade magazine, the first director “to powder her nose before a board meeting.”

By this time she had learnt to deal with such casual misogyny. However when in 1978 she discovered that a newly appointed board member, a male journalist, was being paid £30,000 a year, more than twice her own salary of £14,000, she resigned in outrage.

The only child of Emanuel Green and his wife Annie, Felicity Green was born on June 26 1926 and grew up in poverty above a bike shop in Dagenham. Her parents’ marriage was not happy. Her mother was totally deaf and her father had a terrible temper, so she found herself acting as peace-maker during their frequent rows. Felicity’s passion for fashion was fired by outings with her father to the cinema, where she fell in love with the clothes worn by the Hollywood movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s.

After a stint as “the worst pupil Pitmans ever had”, Felicity Green landed her first job as a secretary at a magazine entitled Woman & Beauty, where, before she was allowed to sit behind a typewriter, she had to walk the office dog and make the coal fires and coffee.

Within a couple of years she impressed the editor-in-chief enough to be promoted to fashion editor, though she was still treated as a dogsbody. On one occasion she was invited by the editor to meet Harold Wilson, a rising star in the Labour Party firmament who was then President of the Board of Trade. She accepted with alacrity but there was a twist. “I had given myself one of the first Toni perms, and the editor wanted me to give one to Mary Wilson, who was coming with Harold… While the great and the good had drinks, I did the perm in the bathroom and got a thank you poem from Mary.”

She moved on to become fashion editor of Housewife, and then to an advertising agency. It was while she was there, in 1955, that Hugh Cudlipp, then editorial director of the Daily Mirror, called to ask her what she thought of a paper he had launched called the Woman’s Sunday Mirror.

She wrote a fierce critique and what followed was “an odd meeting” in which Cudlipp “assumed I would be joining.” She became associate editor of the new journal, beginning a long association with the Mirror group.

The Woman’s Sunday Mirror did not last long, but Felicity moved on to the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror) and in 1961 joined the Daily Mirror as associate editor – the highest-flying female journalist in Fleet Street.

She recalled being warned by a colleague that to survive in the masculine world of newspapers, she must understand that many of her colleagues would resent having to work for a woman: “You will have to give some of them a bollocking from time to time, but do it gracefully and always let him leave your room with his balls intact.” It was, she recalled, a very good piece of advice.

Part of her remit was to inject the paper with a more “feminine” feel, and in her first week there the features editor proudly announced that he had been doing some special work for her pages and had worked up “some nice borders with bows”. She had to let him down gently. After she had been there for a few months one of the sub-editors remarked that she must be relieved now that “all that hatred has disappeared.” “And I said, ‘Hatred?’ And he said, ‘You mean you didn’t notice it?’”

She recalled that all the senior executives had well-stocked refrigerators in their offices and that drinking would begin after the morning editorial conference and continue until the early afternoon, by which time the morning staff were too drunk to do the paper, so a whole new team would come in. She refused to participate.

But she felt that some of the prejudice against women in the workplace was understandable. When she became a director of the group in the mid-1960s, she inherited a section of the paper where all the heads of department were men, ruling the roost over girls who were in many cases much more talented than they were. “I made it my business to promote these women. But within two years, every single one had left to have a family.”

After resigning from the Mirror Felicity Green ran the UK office of Vidal Sassoon, but later returned to journalism, helping to launch Working Woman magazine and advising the boards of the Express, the Telegraph and the publishers of M&S Magazine.

For five years in the 1990s she was a senior lecturer on the Saint Martin’s School of Art fashion journalism course and later she became a mentor of fashion journalism students at the school. In 2014 she published Sex, Sense and Nonsense: Felicity Green on the ’60s Fashion Scene.

She was appointed OBE for services to journalism in 2012.

Felicity Green married, in 1952, Geoffrey Hill; he died in 1992. She had never wanted children, fearing that she would not be a good mother, but during an appearance as a castaway on Desert Island Discs in 2011 she confessed that she would have loved grandchildren.

Felicity Green, born June 26 1926, died September 10 2026