Ossie Clark: The King of King’s Road Who Taught Fashion How to Move

Ossie Clark: The King of King’s Road Who Taught Fashion How to Move

Ossie Clark understood something about clothing that cannot be fully appreciated on a hanger. A dress had to move. It had to respond when its wearer crossed a room, danced, turned, or stepped into a party. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when London fashion was exploding with youth, music and sexual freedom, Clark created clothes that seemed designed for precisely that kind of life. His plunging necklines, narrow waists, sweeping skirts, fluid crepe and Celia Birtwell's fantastical prints dressed some of the most photographed people of the era. Yet behind the glamour was a designer whose extraordinary technical ability was accompanied by addiction, financial instability and a private life that became increasingly difficult. His career burned brilliantly and briefly, but the way Ossie Clark cut fabric still explains why his name refuses to disappear.

Early Life: How Raymond Clark Became Ossie Clark

Raymond Clark was born in 1942 into a large working-class family in northwest England, the youngest of six children. Accounts of his childhood connect his lifelong nickname, Ossie, to Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, where his family lived during his early years.

One of the most dramatic stories repeated about his birth claims that his mother endured a seven-day labour and gave birth during a wartime air raid. The story appears frequently in later biographies, but its documentary basis is less secure than the major milestones of Clark's professional career, so it is better understood as part of the family history surrounding his childhood rather than an essential fact on which his story depends.

What can be traced more clearly is an unusually early fascination with construction.

At 13, Clark studied architecture at school, an experience he later considered invaluable. Architecture taught him to think about proportion, height and volume. Those principles would eventually migrate from buildings to bodies.