Marit Allen

Dec 6 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

WHEN she was a teenager, the hotelier’s daughter from suburban Cheshire developed a passion for the buckskins worn by Davy Crockett, but many years would pass before she was allowed to dress a pair of gay cowboys.

However, during the long wait, she created the expand-ing purple pants sported by the Incredible Hulk.

Clothes were hugely important to the elfin and beautiful Marit Allen, who was immensely desirable to the protective male, but had the vim and energy to zip along on her own power.

So, as a fashion journalist in Swinging London, she was responsible for ensuring that models, including Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, were displayed on the pages of Queen and then Vogue.

However, the battery of fashionable photographers – David Bailey, Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton among them – were just as keen that Miss Allen should pose for them.

Given to wearing saucer-sized glasses beneath her bloom of red hair, inherited from her Norwegian mother, she was brought up in her father’s hotel in Lymm, though she was sent to boarding school at the age of nine.

After a brief spell as a beatnik and as a student at the University of Grenoble, she flowered in the 1960s, championing the young and hip in fashion mags, while escorting “gorgeously unsuitable” young men to the various happenings.

She married Sandy Lieberson, the producer, when she was 24 and, in addition to her famously posing in the nude when pregnant, this led to her career as the costume designer in numerous films, starting with Kaleidoscope, starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York.

In 1973, she worked in Venice on director Nicholas Roeg’s deeply atmospheric film Don’t Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. “Clothes make a statement. Clothes tell a story,” she said.

Her love of the American West had been stimulated by seeing the actor, Fess Parker, in his buckskins and racoon-skin cap when promoting Davy Crockett in 1955.

This enthusiasm was seen in the dressing of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005).

In October, Miss Allen, a divorced mother of three, was in Australia working on Justice League of America when she suffered a brain haemorrhage from which she did not recover.

A delightful companion, she was loved and admired by many.

Marit Allen, journalist and costume designer; born September 17, 1941, died December 1, 2007.