Raymond "Ossie" Clark was born in Liverpool in 1942, raised in Warrington, and won a place at the Royal College of Art in London at twenty. He met his future wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell, as a student; they would collaborate, commercially and personally, for much of his career. He joined the Quorum label in 1965, bought it in 1968, and in 1969 launched the Ossie Clark label. He was twenty-seven.

The Silhouette

Clark's signature silhouette was the bias-cut maxi dress in printed chiffon or crepe — prints invariably designed by Birtwell in florals, Art Nouveau borders, stylised leaves, or paisley. The dresses were constructed with plunging V necklines, bishop sleeves, and long flared skirts. They were designed, he said, for women to dance in.

“

I make dresses for girls to take off. — Ossie Clark

The Clients

His clients through the late 1960s and early 1970s constituted a substantial portion of London's counter-culture aristocracy: Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger (for whom he made a white trouser suit worn at her 1971 wedding to Mick Jagger), Patti Boyd, Anita Pallenberg, Talitha Getty, and Jerry Hall. David Hockney's 1970–1971 painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy depicts Clark and Birtwell in their Notting Hill flat; the painting is, after A Bigger Splash, the most-visited painting in the Tate Britain.

The Decline

Clark and Birtwell divorced in 1974. His business, which he was never qualified to run, entered successive bankruptcies; the Quorum label was dissolved in 1983. He continued freelance and consultancy work through the late 1980s, but he was, by the early 1990s, impoverished, addicted, and effectively homeless. He was murdered in his bedsit in Notting Hill on 6 August 1996 by his former partner Diego Cogolato; Cogolato was convicted of manslaughter the following year.

Clark's diary, published posthumously in 1998, is one of the most extensive first-person documents any twentieth-century British couturier has left. His Birtwell-printed bias-cut dresses of 1968–72 regularly resell at Kerry Taylor Auctions for between GBP 1,000 and GBP 10,000. The V&A holds seventy-three of his garments.