Celia Birtwell is the textile designer whose floral prints on gossamer chiffons, silks and satins, tailored and cut into romantic dresses and shirts by her late ex-husband, Ossie Clark, defined the ethereal look of the late 1960s and 1970s. Talitha Getty, Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Boyd and Bianca Jagger all wore them. Even Brian Jones and Keith Richards couldn't resist the odd blouse. - Kate Finnegan
In their heyday, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell were a classic 70s fashion partnership/marriage, a bit like the team behind Biba, Barbara Hulanicki and Stephen Fitz-Simon (my post on Biba is here). They were friends who did work experience at Christian Dior together and had a black poodle called Beulah after a line in a Mae West movie ("Beulah, peel me a grape"). Partly thanks to his short life and his amazing diaries, Ossie seems to have gone down in history as the tragic genius in the partnership - bisexual, drug abusing, bitter, eventually murdered by a male lover, etc. Although incredibly stable in comparison, Celia Birtwell is also very interesting. She is a close friend of David Hockney and a very funny lady :
"She does a great impression of Hockney ('uuh nuuh, luvvie…'), who just this morning has sent her one of his iPad paintings. She wipes make-up smudges off her iPhone as she shows me a wonderful depiction of the artist's view from his bed at home in Yorkshire to the house across the street. 'He sends them to quite a few people,' she says. 'I get so many I'm a bit nonchalant about them now. You run out of things to say - oh, it's amazing, oh, it's fab - so you don't say anything. Although I did tell him I liked his curtains last week.'"
Celia also had great curly fringe action in her day (which you know I like) and created the loveliest felt tip pen designs, all done from the face downwards; if she didn't like the face of the model she had drawn, she wouldn't continue.
Here are some great photos of Celia and her work from her biography.
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