Fashion designer Dame Mary Quant has died aged 93, her family has announced.
The designer died peacefully at her home in Surrey on Thursday morning, her family said in a statement.
She “was one of the most internationally recognised fashion designers of the 20th century and an outstanding innovator of the Swinging Sixties," they said.
"She opened her first shop Bazaar in the Kings Road in 1955 and her far-sighted and creative talents quickly established a unique contribution to British fashion."
Former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman led the tributes on social media, tweeting: "RIP Dame Mary Quant. A leader of fashion but also in female entrepreneurship - a visionary who was much more than a great haircut."
Quant was an influential figure on London’s style scene in the 1960s and is heralded for having revolutionised fashion through embracing mass production techniques and for changing the way people shopped with her store Bazaar on the Kings Road. Referred to as the ‘Mother of the Mini,’ Quant is often credited with the super short skirts invention – whether true or not, she certainly put miniskirts on the fashion map, making them the ‘it’ item for a young generation of women.
"RIP Mary Quant, who freed the female leg. We owe you," tweeted Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of the International New York Times.
Born in London in 1930 to teacher parents from Wales, Quant experimented with clothes from an early age. Her earliest fashion memory is of being in bed with measles at six years old, cutting the bedspread with nail scissors in order to transform it into a dress. "I didn’t like the clothes I had. I wanted sleeves with a puffier top on them and I wanted this and wanted that and I was trying to cut up the bedspread and make them. From then on, I never stopped.’’
Quant won a scholarship to study art at Goldsmith’s College, where she failed to complete her education but did meet her husband Alexander Plunket Greene, who later helped establish her brand.
She left Goldsmith’s to apprentice with a Mayfair milliner whose salon was situated next to Claridge’s. It was here that Quant, paid just £2 and 10 shillings per week, began to think about fashion more strategically. “It seemed so ridiculous making one hat for one woman to wear to Ascot that cost 30 quid,” said Quant “It seemed obvious that clothes should be made by mass production.”
In 1955, she and Plunket Greene partnered with Archie McNair, an ex-solicitor who had opened Chelsea’s first espresso coffee bar called Fantasy, to open a shop called Bazaar just off the King’s Road. There were clothes and accessories on the ground floor curated by Quant (she didn’t design her own line initially), and a restaurant called Alexander in the basement. With modern lighting, loud music and extended opening hours, Bazaar offered an all-new shopping experience.
Two years after Bazaar opened, she and Plunkett-Greene married and remained together until he died prematurely, at the age of 57 years old in 1990. They had a son, Orlando, who has been involved in championing his mother’s legacy. During London fashion week in 2019 he unveiled a plaque on the Kings Road building where Bazaar once stood.
The couple were well known as members of the so called "Chelsea Set" (a collection of designers, artists, photographers and friends many of whom became influential in the 1960s), and despite having no experience in retail they succeeded in creating a buzzy fashion mecca that quickly became a hangout for the young and fashionable.
The business really took off when Quant began designing her own collections, which were bright, bold and decidedly youth-centric. Alongside miniskirts, Quant favoured hotpants, onesies and PVC raincoats– all of which she mass produced and sold under her own Daisy-logoed brand. She also popularised colourful tights as the perfect item to wear with her short skirts. Such tights were used only in theatres at that time, so she had to convince theatrical tights manufacturers to make them for her.
Other ingenuity came via a detachable white plastic collar that was designed to put a new spin on a favourite black dress (she sold thousands), and the ‘sac dress’ for which she had to persuade knitwear producers to add another foot onto a sweater to turn it into a dress. “That was how the sac was born,” claimed Quant, “and it appeared in Paris a year later.”
She used models of colour - unusual at the time - and replenished shop stock weekly if not daily; a strategy later mimicked by the fast fashion industry. "The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone," said Quant, who launched a cheaper diffusion line in 1963 and also sold patterns so that people could make her clothes cheaply at home.
Within seven years of opening, the business had made over a million pounds and the clothes were in 150 shops in the UK, 320 shops throughout the USA and on sale globally in France, Italy, Switzerland, Kenya, South Africa, Australia and Canada.
At a time when most designers were men, Quant made waves as a woman, designing fun and practical clothes for other women. She captured the imagination of a youth desperate to escape the years of post-war austerity and embrace the Swinging Sixties, and soon became poster girl for a bold, vibrant and flirty era of fashion.
Quant was made a Dame in 2015 for a lifetime of service to the fashion industry. In an interview in 2012 she was asked whether she was ever surprised by how successful she had been.
"I mostly felt, my God, what a marvellous life you had, you are very fortunate,” she said. “I think to myself, you lucky woman — how did you have all this fun?”
