Interview: Celia Birtwell, textile designer

It’s an interesting standpoint from someone who has led the kind of enviably full life that one imagines would be rather fun to reminisce about. But then the 70-year-old textile designer is too busy thinking about what’s ahead to dwell on the past. “I think that there’s only now and the future,” she says. “I have friends of a similar age who hark back to the past when perhaps they had their best times. I think your best times are probably as long as you live. To hark back to the Sixties or Seventies, well, they’re great memories, but listening to people who reminisce all the time, they’re very boring.”

Birtwell sits in front of me in her dark, compact Notting Hill shop, a small dog at her feet. “I draw her,” she says. “But I’m not very good at drawing dogs. I can draw cats but not dogs.”

Vibrant prints are stacked high behind her, and she stands out against them in a plain black dress with tiny bright flowers on it. Her soft, fluffy hair is swept up and she wears modest earrings which shiver a little as she talks. Her face is pure classical beauty; wide-set almond eyes, a strong, slightly hooked nose and rosebud lips.

She is instantly recognisable – even 40 years on – as the subject of one of Britain’s best-loved paintings; David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. Alongside Hockney and her ex-husband, the late fashion designer Ossie Clark, she helped define the Swinging Sixties and she has been both muse and friend to Hockney for decades.

In the famous painting, Birtwell stands straight, looking at a plant on a table. She places one foot in front of her, a hand in her pocket. Inverting the traditional pose for a couple having their portrait painted in the 19th century, Clark sits, nay slouches, louchely. Birtwell is strong, confident and knowing. Her husband appears carefree, their cat Percy (whose real name, Birtwell later revealed to Hockney, was actually Blanche) sitting on his knee, its back to the viewer.

The painting is one of the most visited in Tate Britain, where it hangs today, and remains the best-selling postcard in the gallery’s shop. Its colourful optimism and cool insouciance seems to define an era and it remains for Birtwell a snapshot of her youth.

“Amazing, 40 years, isn’t it?” she says. “Well, of course, it was part of my youth, part of my relationship with Ossie. In my mind I can remember David choosing the bedroom because of the light and the pieces which he felt were very ‘us’. He couldn’t paint Ossie’s feet so he put them in a shagpile carpet and he painted his face lots of times because he couldn’t get it right.”

The anniversary of the iconic painting isn’t the only milestone Birtwell is marking this year. She celebrated her 70th birthday in January, though she disparages all talk of “celebrations”, and was made a CBE for services to the fashion industry earlier this month. 2011, I suggest, seems like the perfect time for the publication of Celia Birtwell, a glossy retrospective exploring her life and career. Indeed, after over four decades in fashion, it’s about time that a comprehensive book about her and her work was published, surely?

“My life’s a bit like that,” she says with a smile. “I mean I don’t really step up for things and I’m not a terribly public person. So this book was nothing to do with anything. No celebrations of any kind except celebrating my life and work. I don’t like celebrations, anyway.”

Born in 1941, Birtwell grew up in the Manchester suburb of Prestwich with her mother, father and two sisters. She loved to draw from a young age and her parents encouraged her.

“My mother was a seamstress and my father was a very bookish man,” she says. “They were a really good combination. It was a modest upbringing but in my home there was a nice garden and my father liked good pictures and collected first editions. My mother made clothes for us all the time. So I had stimulus from them but I remember drawing very early on these little figures which I’ve carried on drawing ever since.”

She went straight from school to art school, enrolling at Salford Technical College – where she met Ossie Clark – to study textiles and pottery. Clark would come home with her and quiz her mother on sewing, something the young Celia had “no patience” for.

“My mother had endless patience,” she says. “I used to watch her but I never learnt anything. I just was sort of mesmerised by her gentle activity of doing it. I didn’t make. I’m a pattern person. I love pattern and I see pattern all the time, possibly because of looking all the time. I look a lot.”

Birtwell has never been someone to shout about her work. In the Sixties and Seventies she collaborated with Clark, creating prints which he would then work into the most coveted clothing of the era. Their creations were worn by everyone from the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix to Twiggy and the Beatles, but Birtwell was known for quietly getting on with things, immersing herself in her work and in bringing up the couple’s two boys, Albert and George.

Manolo Blahnik described her as “one of the most talented textile designers ever”, an opinion backed up by her impressive back catalogue rather than a flamboyant persona or untameable ego. “Oh I have a certain reticence about that,” she says. “I’m not very keen on people who shout about themselves all the time. I think other people should do that for you.” She laughs a knowing laugh.

In 1984, with the help of Hockney, she set up a business designing prints for interiors and has since supplied some of the world’s most prestigious hotels, including Claridges and the Lanesborough. In 2006 she brought her work to a whole new generation, creating a line for Topshop which outsold every other one of the high street giant’s designer collaborations, including Kate Moss’s range.

Indeed, when the first collection went on sale, the flagship store in London’s Oxford Circus sold out of 1,000 special edition garments in six minutes. In recent years she has also collaborated with Habitat, Heal’s, John Lewis, Millets and Boots. Regardless of the project, Birtwell’s focus is always on the new, the fresh.

“When I worked with Topshop I told them that we could do some vintage but we must also do now,” she says. “To do all vintage, I felt that was, not so much insulting, but I like living in the now. I wanted the prints to be relevant because I think there’s nothing worse than being outdated. If that happens, when I feel I’m irrelevant or past it, I will stop.”

Does she ever think seriously about retirement, I wonder? She fixes me with a look that suggests she finds the idea rather preposterous, and takes a long pause before coming up with an anecdote to explain how she feels.

“David has a huge exhibition coming up at the Royal Academy and he’s taken on this big studio,” she says. “He had to sign this contract to have it for five or ten years and he told me that really reinvigorated him. He thought, ‘right I’ve got to keep going for another five years at least’. He said, ‘it took 20 years off me Celia! It’s amazing how it thrilled me to think that I was signing a contract for five or ten years hence.’ I thought it was a very sweet thing to say. The fact that he has that energy gives me quite a boost. He’s a lesson to us all about keeping going.”

Birtwell’s relationship with Clark has been well documented over the years. The couple split in 1974, and his dependency on drugs and alcohol spiralled out of control until he was killed in 1996 by a former lover, Diego Cogolato. It’s not something Birtwell discusses publicly, though she is open about her ongoing friendship with Hockney, one which has arguably been as significant a relationship as the one she shared with Clark.

With the exception of her sister, Hockney was the only guest at the couple’s wedding in 1969. She spent five years in the late Seventies working for him as a paid model in Los Angeles. Today he sends her drawings which he sketches on his iPad. “Sometimes he’ll send me them at 5am,” she chuckles. “He’s obviously sitting up in bed drawing his curtains and the view outside. I can tell where he is by them. It’s like a diary.”

She tells me about a day which stands out in her memory, on which the two friends visited three very different rivers in the space of a few hours: “We were in Utah. We walked up this river in the morning, this canyon. We could touch the edges. Then we went off to this rather strange hot spring pool and we bathed in there. And on our way back to Los Angeles we went to this extraordinary place called Wet‘n’Wild, which was totally artificial with its green plastic grass. David always remembers that we saw three rivers in one day.”

Today her life is quiet but steadily busy. Her son George runs the shop with his wife Bella. It’s still located on Westbourne Park Road, though the area has become gentrified since the Swinging Sixties.

Birtwell reminisces about the characters who used to frequent the locale – the bearded woman, the man who collected corn for his pigeons – before bohemia made way for bankers. Indeed, a section of the book is devoted to these colourful residents, and she mourns their loss, though she’s pleased that the British Legion still play their band music down the road.

“I do still see people,” she says wistfully, “though I don’t think they know who I am. We were really young when we were first here and I remember a huge family of people who worked on the fruit stalls. I’ve watched them age. They’re all still there. I like the familiarity of seeing these people who share your life in a very quiet way.”

Birtwell has been content to share her life and her success with a lot of people. In addition to Clark and Hockney, she counts Philip Prowse, who ran Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for 30 years, as a mentor. And of course, she has been happy to hand control of her shop to her son and daughter-in-law.

There’s none of fashion’s flamboyance about her. No “dahling”, no air kisses. There’s none of the eccentric make-up, elaborate hair or bright kaftans which often characterise fashion’s grand dames. She’s a quiet, modest, measured person and always has been. Indeed, while her husband partied with clients including Mick and Bianca Jagger and Paloma Picasso in the Sixties, she preferred to stay at home with the children.

And today, most residents of Notting Hill probably have no idea that the quiet septuagenarian they pass on the street was once at the centre of swinging London, and ergo at the centre of the world. Not that Birtwell gives it much thought either, of course. She doesn’t like looking back, and anyway, she’s got plenty to look forward to.

Celia Birtwell is published by Quadrille, £30