Close your eyes and imagine you are in a dance class in a suburb of London in 1937. The room is full of little girls preparing to practise. One of the little girls is seven-year-old Mary Quant. She hates the clothes she is wearing, which are hand-me-downs from a cousin. They are at odds with the way she would like her garments to make her look and feel.
Glancing around the room, her eyes come to rest on a vision of loveliness: a girl who looks exactly as she would like to look and is wearing the clothes that she would like to wear. The girl’s hair is cut in a sharp pageboy style and she is wearing a skinny black sweater, a tiny black pleated dance skirt, black ribbed tights and shiny black patent Mary Jane shoes. In the blink of an eye an image is firmly placed in Mary’s head, and it sticks.
It’s easy to forget how dreary, grey and depressing postwar Britain was. A country exhausted and impoverished by conflict, burdened by rationing, struggling to find a place in a new and uncertain world order. It was also still a place of stultifying class rigidity and deference. It was in this unpromising world that a young Mary Quant made her way to Goldsmiths, University of London. She wanted to study fashion but her teacher parents, Jack and Mildred, persuaded her to embark on a course that would qualify her as an art teacher.
Little did they know that they were throwing their shy, elfin daughter into the path of the suave, sexy, sophisticated Alexander Plunket Greene. Scion of an aristocratic family and ex-public schoolboy, he had style, confidence and swagger. They were soon an item and inseparable from then on.
The couple gravitated to London’s Chelsea, which at the time was home to a heady brew of creative types: artists, designers, models, photographers and ladies of the night propping up the bar of the Markham Arms. One of Alexander’s adoring aunts conveniently dropped dead and left him £5,000. With considerable daring, he and Mary decided to buy Markham House on Kings Road, put a restaurant/jazz club in the basement and open a women’s boutique on the ground floor. Their friend and former solicitor Archie McNair invested another £5,000 and they were off.
Alexander’s Restaurant and Bazaar boutique was an extraordinary success. Mary described it as “a bouillabaisse of a shop with bits of everything a girl might need”. She was initially the buyer but found she still couldn’t find the kind of clothes she wanted to wear herself. So with the image of the girl in the dance class firmly in her mind, she started making and selling the clothes she craved. The garments flew off the rails and queues stretched down Kings Road. London had never seen anything like it.
Alexander was a brilliant showman and encouraged Mary to be more daring. It was he who gave her designs names such as Booby Trap, Jeepers Peepers, Cherry Pop, Naughty Nail, Cheeky and Starkers, underlining the fun, irreverence and charm in Mary’s work. The business had been going for eight years before she launched the miniskirt in 1964. She was already internationally famous but the arrival of the mini made her a global superstar and she was the perfect vehicle to promote her brand. With her Vidal Sassoon geometrically cut hair, pale pink lipstick, elfin features and slender figure, she, like Chanel before her, projected an image that millions of women longed to emulate.
The tornado that combined the pill, the Beatles and Mary Quant swept the globe, flattening all that had been before it: a youthquake of emancipation, democratisation and liberalisation. Fashion, music and modern technology joined forces to change the world at a speed never experienced before.
Mary was now the most influential designer since Chanel, though her clothes were infinitely more affordable and accessible. Through her deal with Butterick patterns, girls and women could buy Mary’s designs and make their own Mary Quant dresses. Here was fashion that teenagers and young women could own and wear, which had been designed with them in mind. Fashion was no longer for an exclusive elite. The business grew and grew, incorporating clothes, handbags, shoes, makeup, jewellery, perfume, tights and underwear – all bearing the hallmark of Mary’s inimitable style and always her daisy.
As Mary’s fame grew, so did the pressure on her. Everybody wanted a piece of her – the press, the manufacturers, the public. Such was the mania surrounding her that Mary was pulled in all directions. For a naturally reticent and self-contained person, this type of fame was hard to bear. Mary loved her name being up in lights but hated being the centre of attention.
Mary and Alexander were close friends of my parents, Shirley and Terence Conran, from the early 50s, a friendship that endured for more than 70 years. When my mother was pregnant with me in 1959 and had no clothes to wear, Mary took an old Christian Dior new-look pleated skirt and added a schoolgirl pinafore top to it, converting it into what my mother said was the best dress she ever owned (“I wore it for the whole of my pregnancy. I wish I still had it now”). Mary and Alexander were kind and wonderful godparents to me; they used to sweep down in their Rolls-Royce on my birthday and take me out to lunch somewhere delicious. Knowing that I was musical, they memorably gave me a cello (which I was studying) one birthday. I often think what a thoughtful and generous present that was and remember how overwhelmed the eight-year-old me was. My brother, Sebastian, is their son Orlando’s godfather, and so the friendship goes on.
Mary was private even with her best friends. However, when the conversation turned to something she cared passionately about she could be voluble, engaged, witty and mischievous. She had an endearingly dirty laugh when amused. She was also fiercely intelligent and articulate, with a heart of gold and a will of steel. And when it came to her work she roared like a lion.
Her feminist credentials are scattered through so much of what she did to empower, embolden and emancipate women, whether by promoting hair that didn’t have to be spun like sugar or designing simple, clean, easy-to-wear clothes that you could run, jump and dance in, or flat, comfortable shoes that didn’t agonise you by the end of the day. She is one of the true heroines of the women’s movement.
What would Mary have considered her most successful product? I think her answer would be Orlando, her delicious son.
