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.
