Molly Parkin (3 February 1932 – 5 January 2026), Artist, writer, and fashion icon, has died aged 93. Born in Pontycymer in the Garw Valley, Glamorgan, Wales, the second of two daughters, she and her family moved to London to live with her grandparents when the Second World War began in 1939.
A scholarship student at Goldsmiths and Brighton College of Art, Parkin was taken seriously early on; her abstract works with Celtic overtones were noticed and collected by Tate.
London in the (Swinging-Sixties) was not short of personalities, but Parkin cut through it with unusual velocity. She had an eye for sharpness, unembarrassed, and allergic to caution. Fashion quickly became the arena where she could do the most damage. As fashion editor of Nova, then Harpers & Queen, and later The Sunday Times, she helped invent the look and tone of the Sixties: clever, erotic, graphic, and gleefully unmanageable. She didn’t follow trends. She instigated them.
Her legacy in fashion is formidable. Manolo Blahnik. Barbara Hulanicki and Biba. Paco Rabanne. Michael Roberts and Mr Pearl. Names that still resonate within the industry. Parkin did that work instinctively, often before anyone else knew what they were looking at. In 1971, she was named Fashion Editor of the Year, though titles were never the point.
She was everywhere else, too. In 1964, she began making hats and bags for Biba. A year later, she opened her own boutique and sold it to photographer Terence Donovan. In the same breath of the decade, she acted in Lionel Rogosin’s Good Times, Wonderful Times, a film nominated as the British entry in the Venice Film Festival. She helped write Oh! Calcutta, the show conceived by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan alongside John Lennon and Samuel Beckett. Rules did not interest her. Participation did.
Soho was home territory. The Colony Room Club functioned as an extension of her living room, and she moved easily among Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the assorted brilliance of that circle. She described life as “character-building,” which was one way of putting it. Another might be glorious hell. She survived it anyway.
Unapologetically, there were many affairs with the men who defined a cultural moment: John Mortimer, Peter Shaffer, Cedric Price, Bo Diddley. And James Robertson Justice. Molly was married twice, to art dealer Michael Parkin and later to the artist Patrick Hughes.
Eventually, she walked away from fashion altogether. Writing took over: comic erotica, novels, television appearances, and a solo stage show she performed alone for five years. Ten books later, she had already lived several complete careers. She divorced the painter Patrick Hughes. Life continued to lurch forward.
Then came a slamming on the brakes. At 55, Parkin gave up alcohol and cigarettes—lifelong addictions—and stayed sober for the next 35 years. It was not framed as a work of redemption, but it functioned as one. With sobriety, painting returned.
From a Chelsea council flat studio—famously described as being “inside a melted rainbow”—Parkin painted almost daily. The Molly’s Jewels series, produced well into her nineties, is precisely what it sounds like: colour, pattern pushed to the edge of collapse, joy that knows what it cost to arrive. Last summer at the age of 92, she exhibited at the Rogue Gallery in St Leonards on Sea alongside her daughter, Sophie, and her granddaughter, Carson Parkin-Fairley. Three generations bursting with talent.
In 2012, she was awarded the Queen’s Civil List Pension for services to British culture and the arts. It felt less like an honour bestowed than an overdue acknowledgement.
Her daughter Sophie Parkin confirmed her death, saying that an “extraordinary human has left the building.” It’s hard to imagine her staying put anywhere for long. Molly lived with Alzheimer’s for about 10 years.
Top Photo: Courtesy Sophie Parkin
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