Felicity Green OBE

Posted: September 13, 2026

Felicity Green, OBE , trail-blazing women’s and fashion editor on the Daily Mirror, who later joined the board as publicity director, died on September 10 [2026], aged 100.

Her stellar career began somewhat inauspiciously as a shorthand typist and secretary at Woman & Beauty in the 1940s, but within two years she was promoted to fashion editor. In 1955, she was hired as Fleet Street’s first female associate editor – on Woman’s Sunday Mirror, though it was later folded into Woman magazine.

Felicity moved on to the Sunday Pictorial (later to become the Sunday Mirror ) in 1959 , also as associate editor. Her role encompassed women’s editor, and she helped to promote the interests of women in all sections of the newspaper. She covered fashion, but confessed to be “more interested in style”. The inclusion of the miniskirts of Mary Quant in the Mirror saw Felicity threatened with the sack by Cecil King, (chairman of IPC, of which the Mirror Group of Newspapers was a part). But Hugh Cudlipp, by then chairman of MGN, supported her.

The rest is history as they say, and Felicity wrote about her Mirror career in “Sex, Sense and Nonsense”, published in 2014. Felicity Green  avoided being fully absorbed into the fashion industry. She told the Telegraph in 2014: “Fashion is not a bloody religion, as most fashion editors seem to think it is. There is a difference between fashion and clothes. One is the real stuff, which is the clothes. Then there is fashion, which is some kind of mesmeric stuff out there that persuades the world to go in certain directions rather mysteriously. It’s all big business. And I’d rather people spent money on clothes than arms.”

Above. The spread in Mirror Pensioner, autumn 2019, paying homage to Felicity’s reign

Felicity was eventually to become executive women’s editor across the three Mirror titles, and in 1973, the group’s publicity director. She joined the newspaper’s board, the first woman to achieve such a position at that point in time. Green had some initial trouble as the only woman using the directors’ lift. She said she survived at the Mirror for so long “by being nice to people. Don’t start arguments. People can either help or hinder you. Well, you are an idiot if you cause them to hinder you. So I’m very tactful – if you are tactful people are always ready to help you”.

She resigned in 1978, when she found out that a new male journalist had been appointed to the board at more than twice her own salary. “Apparently, I was supposed to be honoured simply to be a director”, she observed years later.

In 1977, Green joined Vidal Sassoon as managing director of operations in Europe and executive vice-president of the American company. Later she advised the board of the Telegraph, and worked for the M&S magazine, which included interviewing Margaret Thatcher about her fashion interests.

In the early 1990s Felicity became a senior lecturer in fashion journalism at the Central St Martins College of Art and Design. She was awarded the OBE in 2012 for services to journalism. She was married Geoffrey Hill who pre-deceased her.