Full Marks for Trying: An unlikely journey from the Raj to the Rag Trade

Brigid Keenan was never destined to lead a normal life. From her early beginnings--a colorful childhood in India brought to an abrupt end by Independence and Partition, then a return to dreary postwar England and on to a finishing school in Paris with daughters of presidents and princes--ordinary just wasn't for her. When, as a ten-year-old, she overheard her mother describe her as "desperately plain," she decided then and there that she had to rely on something different: glamour, eccentricity, character, a career--anything, so as not to end up at the bottom of the pile. And in classic Brigid style, she somehow ended up with them all. Fate often gave Brigid a helping hand: in the late fifties, in her teens, she landed a job as an assistant at the Daily Express in London, and by the tender age of twenty-one she was a fashion editor at the Sunday Times. It was the dawn of the swinging sixties, and London was the place to be. Brigid teamed up with David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, chatted with Vidal Sassoon, drove around London in a minivan, covered the Paris Collections and was labeled a "Young Meteor" by the press. Though she was always trying to do her best, sometimes her enthusiasm--and naïveté--led to a succession of hilarious misadventures, like the time she turned up to report on the Vietnam war wearing a miniskirt .