All her designs at the moment are for young girls and yet, “There’s a huge
market out there for people like myself who would wear patterns if they
could find them in suitable styles. I really feel for my generation, because
we’re starved of suitable clothes that aren’t skimpy. I mean, you
don’t really want to show your arms, for instance, when you’re my age. Mine
aren’t bad, actually, but they’re not wonderful. And my legs are still good
with a stocking on, but I always wear trousers.
“We’re all vain, really, but it’s very depressing because I can’t really be
bothered to diet any more. I really can’t and yet if I ate everything I
wanted I would be the size of a house. And what is there around for women in
bigger sizes? Evans?” she laughs. “I’ve got lots and lots of friends and
colleagues and acquaintances who say the same as I do, and that is that
there’s everything for youth and beauty and nothing for the older woman. And
it’s a bloody shame. Even my doctor, who’s quite a big woman, said the other
day that she’d love one of my blouses from Topshop but there was nothing
that would fit her. So it’s a cry and I think, ‘Well come on Birtwell, you
can be a bit of a pioneer and do something about it.’”
Her fashion tips for the older woman (and she doesn’t consider herself a
fashionista, saying: “Fashion can be very lightweight, can’t it? And silly”)
are to wear blocks of plain colour and restrict your patterns to details in
the cuffs or hems or in a scarf.
During her long years out of the limelight, Birtwell brought up her two sons,
Albert and George, by Clark (the couple divorced in 1974) and opened a small
shop in Westbourne Park Road in 1984 selling her fabrics, conveniently up
the street from her house. Next year will mark the shop’s 25th anniversary,
but she is fighting off Bella and Antonia’s plans to organise a big
celebration: “No, I’m not going to do that,” she says staunchly. “I’m not
agreeing and I’ve said to Bella I don’t want to because I don’t like
anniversaries or celebrations – I like going to other people’s but not for
me. I’ve never liked them, even when I was 21.”
Has the area changed a lot? “Just a bit... what do you think?” Birtwell
laughs. “It’s the hub of the universe, I think they think.” “They” being the
Notting Hill set who’ve moved in. “It’s amazing… amazing. Well, I’m not the
right age group any more, so you have to keep a low profile, really –
because it’s all to do with youth and beauty.” A lot of serious money
splashing around? “Tell me about it,” she says, more dazed than
disapproving. “You see these cars and I mean the most stylish girls –
incredible looking, so pretty, beautifully groomed with little frocks on.
The pick and it happens to be in my street. I lived in Notting Hill for a
long time and when I moved to Westbourne Park Road and first had the shop,
it was really quite seedy. It was… poor, quite poor.”
Hockney – who was always close to Birtwell, his muse as well as one of his
dearest friends (in spite of an early fling with her husband) – helped her
raise the necessary funds by arranging for his studio to take one of her
drawings by him, and holding it until she could repay a loan of £20,000.
She’s not all that keen on the endless recyling of this story for some
reason; perhaps because it reminds her of when life was a bit of a struggle.
Certainly, apart from the financial uncertainties, her ex was problematic. His
response to her asking for a divorce was to kick her and punch her so hard
in the face he broke her nose. [This was an entry in his diaries.] When I
ask her if he was often violent towards her, Birtwell says: “He wasn’t very
nice to me.”
Clark had custody of the boys each weekend: “I couldn’t really rest because I
was alarmed by his unpredictability [the boys were only five and three when
their parents divorced] and irresponsible behaviour isn’t really what you
want for your children.” Was he drinking with them? “God knows what he was
doing. I don’t know. I kept very much away from it. I could never quite work
out what it was that I was frightened of, but he did frighten me.”
Birtwell would prefer not to dwell on these difficult times, mainly for the
sake of the boys, who are now approaching 40 and have children of their own.
But neither was she thrilled with their decision to publish their father’s
journals in 1998, two years after he was stabbed to death by his young
former lover, Diego Cogolato. The Ossie Clark Diaires, described by
one commentator as “relentlessly miserable”, focused not on the designer’s
glory days when he hung out with the likes of Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton and
Mick and Bianca, but his fall from grace: the struggles with alcohol, drugs
and depression, bankruptcy in 1983, feelings of failure, his search for
casual sex and increasing rejections, lack of money and reliance on
Salvation Army meals. Did she warn her sons about the likely content? “I did
try and it wasn’t something that I recommended, but how do you spell
something like that out? It’s too difficult.”
When I comment on how much the obituaries made of him living in a council flat
[in Notting Hill, after all, hardly a ghetto], she says: “It’s the whole
image, isn’t it – of building a situation where somebody who could have been
living in a château... Well, it’s sort of spelling it out, really.” Did she
have any presentiment that his life could end so abruptly [at the age of
54]? “I don’t know… I didn’t really see him for quite a long time before he
fell apart. He would come into the shop occasionally and get fabric from me
sometimes. But he was pretty removed. I didn’t really find that we had much
to say to each other. He was very bitter. People rescued me and I just think
I was very glad of that.”
I wonder whether she can see anything of Clark in her sons now to remind her
of what made her fall in love with their father before everything turned
sour? “Yes, when you see one of them smile and they look a bit like him.
Yes, you do – of course you do – or the way they move or do little things.”
Birtwell is funny, as she often is (I can see why Hockney finds her such
amusing company), about the alleged glamour of hobnobbing with the great
names of the Sixties. The closest she got to Jimi Hendrix, for instance, was
shaking his hand in a basement Indian restaurant in the Fulham Road and
clamping a pillow over her ears when Ossie played his records all night
long: “I used to think, ‘Oh God, I could do without him at 2.30 in the
morning.’”
