Jane Elizabeth Green trained as a fashion designer at the London College of Fashion in 1957-58 and at the Royal College of Art from 1958 to 1961. In her graduating year she was given the Frederick Starke Travelling Award for the best designer of wholesale fashion, which enabled her to travel to New York and Florence. Despite the premium attached to couture design, Green always wanted to design for the high street; her clothes were put into production by the fashion designer and promoter Frederick Starke and she produced designs for the Wallis chain. She went into teaching and was a lecturer in fashion and textiles at Hornsey and Nottingham College of Art from 1963 to 1966. Thereafter she departed from her design career, undertook secretarial work and trained as a lawyer; she was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1993.

Green’s student work from the late 1950s and early 1960s is of interest as evidence of fashion design education at the RCA. There is great emphasis on formal wear and on highly structured designs that required good cutting skills. Green’s design style is fresh and dynamic and the drawings are of high quality, often annotated with notes about materials and the ‘scenario’ of the design exercise, for example, ‘Informal alfresco lunch with President and English and French ambassadors and their wives in White House Garden’.