Alice Through Our Looking Glass

Alice Pollock is a dreamy sort of girl – incredibly thin with large, sullen eyes and wispy hair. Emancipated yet feminine she is the other half of the Quorum design team. She and Ossie Clark design beautiful clothes for their shop in the King’s Road and also produce a special budget range for Radley which is sold all over the country.

She lives in an enormous flat with her three children, a cat and a canary. At the moment she is in the throes of redecoration. One room she has already painted bright green – it is sparsely furnished with simple, modern furniture and some good paintings on the walls. The shelves are crammed with objects she has picked up in junk shops – glass cylinders filled with dried flowers, Art Nouveau statues and books.

Her bedroom is extremely large and feminine, with an old, junky dressing table covered with flowers. Tulips, freesias and azaleas are her favourites at the moment. Her vast wardrobe is crammed full of clothes – mainly her own designs and a few old clothes she has found in junk shops.

During the day Alice wears no make-up at all, and for the evening she makes up only her lips and eyes from a Leichner paintbox. Currently she is wearing a silvery green on her lips and a dark red on her eyes – which somehow looks all right. She washes her hair every day in a herb shampoo and never sets it – just shakes her head as it is drying and separates the ends with her fingers.

Her evenings she usually spends with friends, going out to dinner or occasionally to pop concerts, but the weekends she spends with her children.

Her spring collection has a very romantic, feminine feeling, the fabrics are the softest – chiffons, silks and occasionally cotton jersey – and the colours are palest blues, lemons, pinks and greys. She has maintained a long look for both day and evening, but in a few styles the length has crept up to just below the knee.

All clothes are by Alice Pollock.

Photographed by Caroline Arber.

Scanned from 19 Magazine, April 1970.