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.
The Sixties youthquake was expressed in her fun clothes. It is really only the young who can actually afford to show off their legs – minis don’t work on anyone over 30. It must have been hell back then for anyone with fat legs. But that’s what the customers wanted who came into her boutique…to go shorter and shorter. And she did.
But then back then, it really was a different world. Post-war austerity was dead but there weren’t the extremes of wealth there are now. The King’s Road, and come to that, Sloane Street, wasn’t a place where you’d pay hundreds of pounds for a designer T-shirt; nor was it somewhere where pieces could be knocked up overseas for the equivalent of Primark. Mary Quant pieces weren’t cheap but neither were they ridiculously expensive. Fashion was affordable if you were on a modest wage, and if you couldn’t afford it, there was always the option of running up a dress yourself; girls then had the skills.
One of Mary Quant’s genius collaborations was with Butterwick paper patterns, so if you wanted to customise your own Mary Quant box skirt or pinafore dress, you bought the pattern and the fabric and off you went.
Mary Quant was, as fashion writer Tamasin Doe says, a serious designer. “She, like Terence Conran, was an inherent modernist. The moment found them, and they found the moment.” She went to Goldsmith’s College and was apprenticed to a couture milliner — she hated that exclusivity; she was skilled with the scissors. At the Mary Quant exhibition at the V&A a couple of years ago, I found myself next to her younger brother. “I was the first one she worked on”, he recalled ruefully. “She took her scissors to my hair”. No stopping her.Granted, her husband was the business brain behind the Mary Quant enterprise, but she was a genius in creating a market. She designed not just short dresses with big zips but the tights you needed to wear them — this, after all, is a climate that calls for hosiery — and in colours no one had thought of: hot pinks, zingy orange, acid green. In fact she made that whole range of chemical colours her own. She hijacked girls’ school uniforms for her looks, and skinny men’s jumpers.
She embodied the look herself – Vidal Sasson gave her that famously sculpted bob (though it only worked on fine hair like hers; Leonard Lewis came along next to rescue girls with thick hair). And she also had a make-up line that epitomised the aspirations of a generation — for pale lips and cat-flick eyes. Something of her design brilliance can be seen in her logo… that very simple but unmistakeable flower. The Sixties optimistic embrace of modernity can be seen in the way she embraced synthetics. Only she could have made boots from white plastic. Back then, this was unthinkable. White! Plastic! Boots!
Did she make a contribution to feminism? Mary Kenny, a writer who wore the minis and the hotpants at the time, thought that “claims that Mary Quant was part of a feminist movement were false — feminism at the time rejected, robustly, the world of cosmetics and fashion”. Still, as a serious female entrepreneur, she made her mark.
And she left her mark on a generation. At the V&A show I met women in their seventies looking wistfully at the dresses on display, and their buoyant youth. “I used to have that,” one said. “It was lovely”.
