Sex, drugs and floral fabrics: Celia Birtwell relives her wild times – and wilder outfits – with Ossie Clark — SkimNews
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- Fashion and Textile Museum is opening "Ossie Clark + Celia Birtwell," a retrospective of the duo whose botanical-print chiffon defined the psychedelic gap between Mary Quant's miniskirts and punk; Birtwell's wedding dress — a daisy-print number she wore while pregnant — is her favourite piece.
- Celia Birtwell, 85, co-designed Burberry's entire London Fashion Week catwalk collection with creative director Daniel Lee, downplaying it to the interviewer as "a few bits and pieces."
- David Hockney, who died in June, sat Birtwell around 100 times over six decades and was one of only two guests at her 1969 wedding to Ossie Clark — the other being Clark's sister Kay; Birtwell says, "I never thought he'd die before I did."
- Ossie Clark made stage clothes for Mick Jagger and accompanied the Rolling Stones on tour, while a 1970 catwalk show drew two Beatles, Cecil Beaton and Brigitte Bardot; Hockney's "Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy" sealed the couple's place in the mythology.
- Clark, openly bisexual, honeymooned alone in Barbados the day after his 1969 wedding, and was murdered at 54 by an ex-boyfriend in his west London flat — long after the couple split in 1974 amid his addiction and bankruptcy.
- Birtwell designed collections for Topshop in 2006 (queues around the block), Uniqlo, and Valentino in 2015 (then run by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli); she was awarded a CBE in 2011.
- Birtwell sold most of her Ossie Clark archive to a California vintage dealer years ago, admitting "half of me cries about that" but proper storage was impractical.
Why it matters: Print designer Celia Birtwell, long treated as the decorative half of the Ossie Clark partnership, is finally getting her due — a Fashion and Textile Museum retrospective AND co-designing Burberry's entire catwalk collection at 85 — even as both her closest artistic collaborators are now gone.
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