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Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell are getting the show London has owed them for decades. The Fashion and Textile Museum opens Ossie Clark / Celia Birtwell on October 2, 2026, at its Bermondsey Street site, running into April 2027. More than 120 garments go on display, drawn largely from a single private collection with additional loans from Birtwell herself, and the framing is deliberate: a reassessment of Clark’s cutting. The private collection reportedly spans Clark’s entire working life, from his earliest student pieces through to the jersey collections he was still producing into the 1980s.
They met as students in Manchester. Clark went on to the Royal College of Art; Birtwell trained separately as a textile designer. By the mid-1960s, the two were running Quorum, the West London boutique that made both their names, Clark on the pattern table and Birtwell on the print. Married in 1969, divorced in 1974, the same year Quorum shut its doors. Those years saw the pair establish themselves as leading names in London’s fashion scene, attracting clients such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and actress Brigitte Bardot.
Before the London exhibition, Mr & Mrs Clark was presented in Prato in 2022 and later staged in Milan the following year. Although it explored the same creative partnership, it was assembled from a separate private collection and curated independently of the London show.
The exhibition begins with some of Clark’s earliest work, including the mail-order Paper dress decorated with Birtwell’s orange-and-green Art Deco-inspired floral print. It also features the 1967 Bakst dress, whose vivid circular motifs reference the stage designs of Léon Bakst while echoing the colour experiments of Sonia Delaunay. Then the tailoring proper, the pieces that actually earned Clark his reputation. The 1968 Lamborghini jacket is the standout, a long satin piece in a black, red and cream Chinoiserie print, worn over the years by both Twiggy and the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman.
A black-and-red crepe trouser suit embroidered with strawberries, once modelled by Jean Shrimpton, hangs near the ruffled chiffon shirts Brian Jones favoured. Nearby is a powder-blue dress cut on the straight grain, its chiffon wound in a spiral around the body and printed with Birtwell’s black birds and gold flowers. The curators have nicknamed it the Ziggy Stardust dress.
According to the museum’s preview, visitors will also encounter Clark’s bias-cut jersey designs, flowing chiffon pieces, sharply cut flared trousers and one of his distinctive python-skin jackets, a material he revisited throughout his career.
Watching the show move from the linear, dolly-bird minis of the early 1960s into the looser, bohemian cut of the years that followed is the closest thing to watching the decade happen in real time. Most of it has stayed in private hands since it was made.
Upstairs covers what came next. Clark kept working, mostly in jersey, through the 1970s and into the 1980s, though for a smaller list of clients than he’d had at Quorum. Birtwell carried on designing textiles for decades. Her 2006 collaboration with Topshop sold out and features in the show.
Dennis Nothdruft, the museum’s head of exhibitions, put it plainly: the pairing helped define the London look of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He added that Clark’s cutting, and his read on the female form, had rarely been rated alongside designers whose businesses simply lasted longer. The breadth of material on display is intended to prompt a fresh appraisal of Clark’s achievements as a designer. Design historian Teresa Collenette, who has worked on several previous Fashion and Textile Museum shows, including a 2018 exhibition on the history of scissors, is credited with this one too.
Clark’s public legacy has mostly survived secondhand, largely through Birtwell’s prints and through David Hockney’s 1970-71 painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy at Tate Britain. Percy, for anyone wondering, was the couple’s cat. His own label didn’t outlast him. More than 120 pieces, spanning most of his working life, are the closest the public has come to seeing the whole picture at once.
Ossie Clark / Celia Birtwell runs at the Fashion and Textile Museum on Bermondsey Street from October 2, 2026, to April 2027. The museum opens Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm, with last entry 45 minutes before close. It was founded in 2003 by Dame Zandra Rhodes and is now run by Newham College. It’s the only UK museum built solely around contemporary fashion and textile design, and it holds no permanent collection of its own. Tickets are timed and worth booking ahead. Everything on view rotates. This one won’t come back around.
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