Getting Dressed: Penny Graham
At 50, Fleet Street fashionista Penny Graham turned to art
New leaves are turned, good resolutions are made and sometimes lives are changed at this time of year.
Someone who knows all about this is Penny Graham, the fashion journalist. Aged 50, she enrolled at her local adult education pre-foundation art course. She moved on to Chelsea School of Art, and then embarked on a whole new career as a painter.
When she tried to tell Chelsea about the kind of art she wanted to do – scenes of house interiors – they said, ‘Don’t show us that bourgeois crap.’ Undeterred, she went ahead and her work is enchanting: a touch of Grandma Moses, a dash of Vuillard and a lot of Penny Graham.
Graham’s career had already been through several incarnations: after finishing school (Mademoiselle Anita’s in Paris, where The Oldie’s Virginia Ironside and I were also students at different times), she did a modelling course at Lucy Clayton.
Then, because her stepmother had been a model at Hardy Amies, Graham was able, almost literally, to step into her elegant shoes. She modelled for Amies for a few years until, one day, walking down the catwalk in a long velvet gown, she suddenly felt like Mary, Queen of Scots, going to the scaffold, and decided it was time to stop.
A stint on the Daily Express followed (probably, she says, courtesy of her father, Clive Graham, who was The Scout, the paper’s racing correspondent). Then she became Fashion Editor for the Evening News; her photograph appeared on the sides of London buses.
When the News closed down, she continued to write on fashion for other magazines and newspapers. She recalls one season at the Paris collections, looking across some grand showroom, seeing the line-up of fashion editors on the front row and thinking how old they seemed. ‘I am NOT going to be doing this when I am 50,’ she vowed. Her next incarnation lasted about 20 years during which, with Roger Hutchins, she produced fashion shows. These could be for stores, promotions, students’ work, wedding-dress designers and, once, for me. Back in the mid-1970s, my husband was working in Brussels. There was a particularly dynamic ambassadorial couple, Sir Peter and Felicity Wakefield, who wanted to fly the flag for Britain by putting on a show of our best designers. Knowing of my background in fashion, they asked me to find someone to do this and I found Graham. I saw first-hand how complicated it is to take 15 models, eight dressers and 100 outfits with all their shoes, accessories and underwear to a foreign country – ‘with its different plugs!’ says Graham feelingly – and impress an audience. In the meantime, Graham, now aged 43, had met the love of her life, Herefordshire landowner George Clive, with whom she spent 18 happy years until he died of cancer, aged only 58. ‘I waited so long for the right man – but if I had met him when I was younger, I wouldn’t have liked him at all. So everything has a time and a place.’ It was indirectly because of George that she decided to chuck in the fashion career and go to art school. Photographer and writer Christopher Sykes, one of George’s friends, looked at a sketch she had done and admired it so much that she began to think of learning to paint. ‘It didn’t occur to me that Christopher was probably just being gloriously polite…’
Now Graham spends four days a week in her studio in Perivale, a day working with old people at a local hospital and some afternoons helping children with learning difficulties do their homework. ‘I don’t have children of my own and I love being part of these things.’
Her years in fashion mean she is very aware of whatever is ‘the contemporary look’, as she puts it. She watches her diet and practises qigong at her local branch of the Mei Quan Academy of Tai Chi.
Her hair has been a priority since she was a teenager and overheard a friend of her mother’s saying, ‘Penny has such pretty colouring, those pink cheeks and mouse-brown hair [her italics].’
‘I went straight out and had my hair dyed plum colour and kept it like that for years.’
Now she has it highlighted and wears it short and spiky – ‘Early Rod Stewart’, she calls it. Guy at Gorgeous in Kensal Rise, London, cuts it, and she uses L’oréal Out of Bed wax to keep it in shape. ‘The other day, someone said to me, “You look as if you’ve had an electric shock.” I loved that.’
Graham’s favourite shops are Uniqlo, any good sale, Toast and a ‘brilliant’ pop-up called the Nearly New Cashmere Company.