Mad about MARY

One woman loves nothing more than sharing her passion for fashion with the world

- MICHELLE ROWLEY

Looking back on her teenage years, 74-year-old L Ruth Lowe recalls with great fondness the fabulous nightlife of the Swinging Sixties. Dressed in their latest Mary Quant-inspired homemade outfits, Ruth and her older sister, Lys, now 76, regularly visited the clubs in their home city of Birmingham to watch the latest bands perform.

Those happy times, centred around music and fashion, were to have a lifelong effect on Ruth, and would eventually lead her to a new and rewarding career at the age of 60.

'My sister seemed to know everybody who was anybody so she could get me into the nightclubs from about the age of 14. It was absolutely fabulous!' Ruth recalls.

Like many teenagers of the time, her sister was heavily into fashion, and she helped and encouraged Ruth to make her own outfits. With their heads full of design ideas from fashion magazines and armed with cheap fabric and accessories bought from Birmingham's Rag Market, the sisters would set to work on their latest creations.

'We both worked as paper girls, and we used to read all the magazines before we delivered them! If there was anything interesting, we'd buy them from the shop and then go home and make them up,' Ruth remembers.

The sisters were so enthralled with Mary Quant they even managed to convince their boyfriends to drive them down to London on the back of their Lambretta scooters to visit the designer's famous boutique, Bazaar, on the King's Road.