Cecil King, the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers, once warned Felicity Green that if she kept putting Mary Quant's miniskirts on the pages of the Daily Mirror, he would, as she recalled it, "arrange for me to be fired." She told him she would keep running them "so long as they are news," she recalled in an interview with The Lady. Green, the Fleet Street fashion and women's editor who in 1973 became the first woman appointed to the board of a British national newspaper, died on September 10, 2026, aged 100.

She had grown up far from Fleet Street, in Dagenham, Essex, and never trained formally as either a journalist or a stylist. Her start, as a junior at Woman and Beauty magazine in the 1940s, was menial: "Having struggled up on the District Line I had to make the fires and walk the dog even before I made the coffee," she told People magazine, a recollection later reported by The Jewish Chronicle. Within two years she had talked her way into the fashion editor's chair regardless.

By the early 1960s Green had moved to the Mirror Group, rising to become the Daily Mirror's women's editor with responsibility for its fashion pages. It was there that she ran one of the era's most consequential fashion promotions. In 1964 she commissioned a young designer named Barbara Hulanicki to produce a pink gingham shift dress with a matching headscarf, to accompany a Mirror feature on women in business. Green expected modest interest, "maybe 3,000, a figure I thought widely optimistic," she said. Instead the paper received more than 17,000 orders, a response so overwhelming that Hulanicki's fabric supplier could not keep pace, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The windfall gave Hulanicki the confidence to open her first shop, under the name Biba, on Abingdon Road.

Green went on to put Twiggy and Quant's designs in front of millions of Mirror readers, and in 1973 she was named a director of Mirror Group Newspapers, becoming, in the words of Press Gazette, "the first woman to sit on the board of any Fleet Street newspaper." In 2005 the same trade paper elected her to its Hall of Fame of the 40 most influential British journalists of the preceding four decades, and her portrait was hung with theirs at the National Portrait Gallery.

After Fleet Street, Green ran the UK office of the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, helped launch Working Woman magazine, and later advised the boards of the Express, the Telegraph and the publishers of Marks and Spencer's in-house magazine. In 2012 she was appointed OBE for services to journalism. At 83 she went back to teaching, mentoring fashion journalism students at Central Saint Martins, the college where she had lectured two decades before. Two years later she published a memoir, Sex, Sense and Nonsense: Felicity Green on the 60s Fashion Scene, for which Hulanicki wrote the foreword, and she appeared on ITV's Lorraine to reminisce about the decade she had helped dress.

In her last years, Green kept up old friendships from her working life. Steven Short, who had worked alongside her at Redwood Publishing from 1996, visited regularly and took her to films, he recalled. After one, Inception, she told him: "Well, I didn't understand a word, but I absolutely loved it."

Green put two designers who defined the 1960s, Quant and Hulanicki, in front of a newspaper audience that no fashion magazine could match, and the boardroom seat she took in 1973 forced Fleet Street to make room, for the first time, for a woman at its table. The memoir she wrote, the portrait hanging at the National Portrait Gallery, and the students she mentored at Central Saint Martins carry that record forward.