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In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers.

It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'

It's a huge change from when I started in the 1960s, but what is really impressive is that the number of ladies on set, the women working on set is a huge percentage. There used to be no women. It was just the leading lady's mother, perhaps the hairdresser and the makeup person.

Women are more sure of themselves today. They don't have to emulate the way men dress.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

In the 1960s, you had this booming economy, and you didn't really have enough men around to fill all the jobs. So there was this sudden demand that women come back and perform a lot of the white-collar and pink-collar roles that men had done before or that hadn't existed before.

The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.

That attitude toward women as objects may have worked for the late Sixties, but it doesn't do so now.

Most women are dissatisfied with their appearance - it's the stuff that fuels the beauty and fashion industries.