Felicity Green

Felicity Green was born on 26 June 1926 and raised in rooms above a bike shop in Dagenham, Essex. From an impoverished Jewish background, she was the only child of Emanuel Green, who ran a local shoe shop, and Annie Green, who was deaf and whom Felicity remembered as the more formidable parent.

Her parents' marriage was unhappy and she often acted as peacemaker. Thursday cinema outings with her father, watching two double features, ignited her lifelong fascination with Hollywood glamour and clothes.

After training that she later joked made her "the worst pupil Pitmans ever had," she joined Woman and Beauty as a secretary who also walked the office dog and made fires and coffee. Within two years she was fashion editor.

She later held the same post at Housewife and worked at advertising agency W.S. Crawford. An early anecdote had her giving Labour politician Harold Wilson's wife Mary a Toni home perm while the men drank, receiving a thank-you poem in return.

In 1955 Hugh Cudlipp asked her opinion of Woman's Sunday Mirror. Her severe analysis won her the job as Fleet Street's first female associate editor. When that paper folded into Woman, she moved to the Sunday Pictorial in 1959.

In 1961 she became associate editor of the Daily Mirror as Lee Howard became editor. Colleagues tried to be helpfully "feminine"; she wanted pages that men would read too, and she modelled her own style on Audrey Hepburn.

Green wrote about Twiggy, Mary Quant and the new London look for a paper selling more than five million copies a day. In 1964 she asked Barbara Hulanicki to design a gingham dress and matching headscarf as a Mirror reader offer costing under three pounds.

About 17,000 orders poured in, helping birth the Biba look and, soon after, Biba's Kensington boutiques. Cecil King threatened her over miniskirts; Hugh Cudlipp backed her and gave her front and back pages to explain the Swinging Sixties.

Green kept a journalist's distance from fashion-industry worship. She told The Daily Telegraph in 2014 that fashion is not a religion, that clothes are the real stuff, and that she would rather people spent money on clothes than arms.

Her blueprint was simple style for ordinary budgets, not chasing Paris collections. That populist seriousness made "Felicity Green on the fashion scene" a trusted Mirror franchise.

She became executive women's editor across the three Mirror titles and in 1973 publicity director, joining the board as the first woman at a UK national newspaper group. She still struggled to convince some staff she belonged in the directors' lift.

She said she survived by being tactful and nice, letting people leave her office "with his balls intact" after a necessary bollocking, advice she credited to a colleague.

In 1978 she discovered a newly appointed male journalist on the board was paid £30,000, more than twice her £14,000 salary. She resigned in outrage, later observing that she was apparently supposed to feel honoured simply to be a director.

The decision underlined both how far she had come and how unequal Fleet Street remained for women executives.

From late 1977 she was managing director of Vidal Sassoon's European operations and executive vice-president of the American company. She later advised the Telegraph and Express boards, worked on Marks and Spencer's magazine, and interviewed Margaret Thatcher about fashion.

In the early 1990s she lectured in fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins. In 2014 she published Sex, Sense and Nonsense, collecting her 1960s Mirror writing. BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs cast her away in 2011.

Green was appointed OBE in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to journalism. The Jewish Chronicle and Mirror colleagues celebrated a pioneer who had opened boardrooms and front pages to women's voices.

Roy Greenslade and others credited her with reshaping how a mass paper covered fashion and, by extension, how Britain saw the Sixties.

She married Geoffrey Hill, a cigar importer, around 1952; he died in 1992. She said she had never wanted children, fearing she would not be a good mother, though on Desert Island Discs she confessed she would have loved grandchildren.

She remained linked to Mirror alumni networks and was remembered by the Association of Mirror Pensioners as a trail-blazing women's and fashion editor.

Felicity Green died on 10 September 2026 at the age of 100. The Telegraph and Mirror Pensioners obituaries remembered her as the most influential fashion editor of the Sixties and the first woman appointed to a national newspaper board.

Green's legacy is a popular fashion journalism that treated readers as adults with budgets, not as disciples of couture. She helped put Quant, Twiggy and Biba into millions of homes, forced open a national newspaper boardroom, and left a paper trail of wit in Sex, Sense and Nonsense.

For women in British media she remains a practical pioneer: stylish, tactful, stubborn about pay, and allergic to fashion as dogma.