If the Sixties in London had a local habitation and a name, it was the King’s Road. And on the King’s Road there was nowhere that expressed the spirit of the age more than the Mary Quant boutique. It was she who gave women what they wanted to wear, and what they wanted to wear was the mini-skirt. If she didn’t create it, she popularised it and made it shorter. And then she went and created hotpants. She dressed the Zeitgeist. As her long-time collaborator, Heather Tilbury Willets observed, “she started the whole of Swinging London”. London was fun, it was happening, and it was for the young.
When we think about the people who shape an era, we think big and serious…intellectuals, playwrights, politicians, the Harold Wilsons and Harold Pinters. But an age can be framed just as much by the people who decide what other people put on in the morning, how they did their hair, how they did their make-up. And the democratisation of Britain was nowhere more evident than in the fashion revolution that was Mary Quant. “Fashion is for everyone”, she declared, and hers really was. For her the mini liberated girls to run for the bus.
