The fashion designer Mary Quant had perfected key aspects of 1960s British pop culture long before midnight chimed on the last day of 1959. The Chelsea girl and her try-anything attitude, her short, narrow garments casually bought from a Kings Road boutique – Quant had been working on these since the mid-50s. It took the zeitgeist until at least 1963 to catch on, let alone catch up.
Quant, who has died aged 93, opened her first Kings Road shop, Bazaar, in 1955, the year after Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel ended her postwar hiatus and reopened her Paris salon. They shared a similar ambition: to clothe young, independent women unsuited to fashion dominated by Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look and the work of the grand couturiers. Quant and Chanel designed their clothes to allow new physical and mental freedoms; Quant (unlike Chanel) was also in favour of fun, in reaction to her own teen years under postwar austerity.
Life then had been rationed, begrudged; almost the only place where the young could create their own excitement was at art college, with the Chelsea Arts Ball an annual chance for frivolity. At that ball a teenaged Quant, clad chiefly in balloons, hooked up with a fellow Goldsmiths’ College student, Alexander Plunket Greene, who swanned around long-haired in his mother’s silk pyjama top, trumpet in one hand and film script in the other.
“Life … began for me when I first saw Plunket,” she wrote in her 1966 autobiography, Quant By Quant. He was short on ready cash, with an income of “four bob a day,” he recalled, “if one bought cigarettes one couldn’t go the cinema too”, but posh and sexually sophisticated. “Alexander had no use for straightforward sex at all,” Quant said, and he also was consistently unfaithful.
He came from a family said to be Evelyn Waugh’s model for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited and was at art college crossing social classes. She, born in Blackheath, south-east London, had been persuaded by her parents, Jack and Mildred, both schoolteachers, to study art rather than fashion on leaving Blackheath high school.
After Goldsmiths’, she worked as a trainee assistant at the Mayfair milliner Erik. Quant picked up pins with a magnet and counted out the ration of one chocolate biscuit a day for the assistants, who were so poorly paid that, as Cecil Beaton exaggerated, “there were weeks when only an aspirin touched Mary’s lips and, but for the Jamaicans in nearby Claridge’s kitchens handing over their refuse bins, she would have starved”.
The creation of a hat was Quant’s practical introduction to fashion, and the sculptural moulding that quickly shapes millinery influenced her approach to clothes. She had reservations about “spending three days making one hat which would be worn for one afternoon by a grumpy, spoiled middle-class woman”, learned dress-pattern-cutting at night school, to put outfits together for herself, and briefly worked for the Butterick pattern company.
Plunket’s poverty ended on his 21st birthday when he inherited £5,000; advised by the entrepreneur Archie McNair, who became Quant’s financial brain thereafter, he took a mortgage on a property on the corner of Markham Square and Kings Road, Chelsea.
He wanted to open a nightclub in its basement, but could not get an alcohol licence, so that level became Alexander’s Restaurant, a bistro influenced by his friend Terence Conran and the recipes of Elizabeth David. Plunket told McNair that his girl was good at clothes, and Quant set up Bazaar on the ground floor.
Bazaar acted in lieu of the desired club, with wine or scotch under the counter and girls shedding their garments on the floor, attracting anti-establishment former art-school characters who had gone into photography and journalism. It was hardly a shop – the preferred word was boutique anyway – since the couple never understood business. Incoming bills were piled up and those at the top were paid – Conran said you could not open the front door for writs. They were part of the new bohemian Chelsea set and their stories became SW3 legend.
Quant bought fabric from Harrods at retail prices on a Plunket family account, and had to sell each batch of clothes before she could buy more; when she ran out of stock, she simply shut up shop and started sewing. When she asked manufacturers to make for her, few would, since her ever-skimpier, shorter shapes did not promise big enough profit margins.
Besides, Bazaar might be closed for weeks with a “gone fishing” sign placed in the window while Quant and Plunket went on holiday. They wanted a wider life, flying off in chartered planes to gamble in Le Touquet: because of the era’s currency restrictions, Quant smuggled out in her knickers the cash to buy a French home. They ran an illegal chemin-de-fer game in the Quant delivery van parked in a different Chelsea street each Thursday.
By the late 50s Quant had synthesised her Chelsea girl look from elements of left bank kooky beatnik and practical details of American sportswear, plus her preference for vulgarity over good taste. Then she began supplementing it with memories of her ideal – a girl of about eight glimpsed during a childhood dancing class, who had a Dutch doll haircut and wore a dark skinny knit, very short pleated skirt, white socks and black patent shoes that focused on the boot button of their ankle strap. Quant made similar clothes the basis of the dolly-bird look of the 60s.
In retrospect, this sexualised projection of a very young girl feels disturbing. Dolly-birds skipped, and knocked their knees, and pointed their toes in what Quant called “the wet-knicker pose”. Stockingtops and suspenders were slowly replaced by patterned or coloured tights, and Quant developed stretchy undergarments no heavier than those tights.
Quant’s own hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon, cut geometric variants of the bob. The whole ensemble pointed in one direction. “The crotch is the most natural erogenous zone,” said Quant, directing her models in their Banlon, Bri-nylon and PVC minishifts to prance for maximum pelvic thrust, and claiming that her husband once cut her own green-dyed pubic hair into a heart shape. Angry bowler-hatted men beat with fists on Bazaar’s window, Quant recalled: “It got to them in some way, what I was doing.”
Being a dolly-bird was just about affordable on teen pay. Quant went wholesale in 1961, and two years later launched mass-market fashions under the name Ginger Group – ginger, prune and grape being the previously non-fashion colours that she favoured. She also signed on as an adviser with the US retailer JC Penney: from then on she could afford to hop on big jet planes to distant destinations at whim, as she had once done buses on Kings Road; her personal transport was a black Mini car with a black leather interior.
But she was never comfortable with large-scale clothes production and soon realised that the real money lay in franchising household goods such as bedding, and, even more, in designing faces.
Mary Quant cosmetics arrived in 1966 and were more original than her clothes. Cosmetic containers had traditionally been designed as ornaments for dressing tables, with lipsticks and compacts based on 18th-century boudoir trinkets. Quant observed that professional models painted their faces like canvases with brushes and theatrical grease sticks, and as an art student she had worn the contents of her watercolour paint tubes. She commercialised these ideas, and the daisy logo that was always the doodled focal point of her dress sketches then appeared on makeup packaging – yellow tins of crayons, and simplified bottles, sold not from store counters but from “pods” that might have been moon landing capsules.
Skin cream was sold with matching vitamin pills. Bazaar closed in 1969, by which time 7 million women worldwide had Quant’s label in their wardrobe.
Quant cosmetics also dwindled away in the 70s but were revived under licence in Japan in 1984, and re-exported to the west in the 90s. Japan was Quant’s most logical market, for young women there have cultural sanction to present themselves as prepubescent – pretending to be very young is seen as liberating, which appealed to Quant, who said: “I grew up not wanting to grow up, growing up seemed so terrible, children were free and sane.”
She eventually resigned as director of the company, and lost control in 2000 of her name and her daisy, but stayed as consultant. She also began designing clothes for the New York store Henri Bendel, which realised her vintage work was being collected. Her approach was understood as being as dramatically simple as Chanel’s – “Only I had better legs than Chanel,” said Quant.
Her first retrospective exhibition, Mary Quant’s London, in 1973 at the Museum of London, had a 50s gloom room so visitors could appreciate the difference she had made, for which she was appointed OBE in 1966 – an extremely big deal at the time. She was made a dame in 2015, and a companion of honour this year.
When the V&A put on a lifetime retrospective show in 2019, it sourced exhibits radically by asking the public to loan Quant clothes they had kept. Many of those selected were displayed with old photographs of their owners wearing them, captioned with the outfit’s personal “story”. The exhibition drew huge crowds, with visitors talking to each other – a rare occurrence – about what it had been like to wear Quant fashion when it was new.
Although the Chelsea set regarded home as the place you went when there was nothing better to do, Quant loved her house in Grasse, Provence, and a retreat in Guildford, Surrey. There she gardened by torchlight when day faded, and installed a 60s Claes Oldenburg plastic statue commemorating dolly-bird knees.
The turbulent marriage of the Plunket Greenes, which had begun in 1957, ended with his death in 1990. Her later partner, Antony Rouse, died in 2014. Quant is survived by Orlando, the son from her marriage, and three grandchildren.
• This article was amended on 14 April 2023. The property where Bazaar was housed was on the corner of Markham Square (not Street) and Kings Road.
• Mary Quant, fashion and cosmetics designer, born 11 February 1930; died 13 April 2023
