Dame Mary Quant: The 60s high street fashion trailblazer
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Dame Mary Quant, who has died aged 93, designed miniskirts, patterned tights, hot pants and plastic raincoats which epitomised the look of swinging London in the 1960s.
She took fashion off the catwalk and put it out on the street with clothes which were not just stylish but fun and affordable as well.
In doing so she became the pioneer of high street fashion, paving the way for the modern clothing chains that would become a familiar sight in every shopping centre.
One noted commentator once compared her influence on fashion with that of designers such as Chanel and Dior.
Mary Quant was born February 1930 in Blackheath, southeast London, the daughter of Jack and Mary Quant, who had originally come from mining families in South Wales.
They had both won scholarships to their local grammar school and then gone on to Cambridge before moving to London to become teachers and joining the middle class.
Bazaar was her first retail business
Her interest in clothes developed when she was barely out of nappies and she once recalled embarking on her first collection when she was just six.
"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.''
The war caused major disruption to her education. She had to leave London because of the Blitz and ended up attending no fewer than 13 schools.
Precarious existence
Like many of her generation, she believed that the hardships endured during the war years helped spark the movement that became the swinging 60s.
"Before, there were 10 years of gloom and despair, when London was a bomb site,'' she once told The Sunday Telegraph. "Nothing moved, nothing happened. And then suddenly the next lot of young people said, 'Enough of this, we're going to do it,' and they did it themselves.''
She won a scholarship to the prestigious Goldsmith's College where she failed to complete her course but did meet a future husband and business partner in fellow student Alexander Plunkett-Greene.
Legs featured heavily in her 1971 collection
She quit Goldsmith's to go and work for a milliner in Bond Street, while Plunkett-Greene eked out a precarious existence as a photographer.
Making hats did not provide much of an income in 1950s London, and Quant, without the means to buy new clothes, began to make her own.
They both became well known as members of the so called "Chelsea Set" a collection of designers, artists, photographers and general artistic hangers-on, many of whom would be influential in the 1960s.
Miniskirt
In 1955 the couple set up a shop called Bazaar just off the King's Road where they sold a range of clothes and accessories. Their inexperience saw the business struggling in the early weeks until Quant decided that she would start putting her own designs into the shop and began employing seamstresses to make up the clothes.
Her clothes appealed to a new generation of women who had decided they did not want to dress like their mothers and, with the post-war economic recovery well underway, had the disposable income to indulge their tastes.
Two years after Bazaar opened, she and Plunkett-Greene married. They would be together until his premature death in 1990, despite his constant womanising and penchant for the alcohol that would eventually kill him.
Her business took off when she started selling her own designs
It was the miniskirt more than any other garment, that came to epitomise the new liberated woman. Hems had been rising since the late 1950s but it was Quant who popularised the style and put it out into the mass market.
"It was the girls on the King's Road who invented the mini," she said. "I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes, in which you could move, in which you could run and jump and we would make them the length the customer wanted. I wore them very short and the customers would say, 'Shorter, shorter.'"
She also became one of the first fashion designers to work with PVC producing a range of wet-look clothes that made the pages of all the best fashion magazines.
Daisy motif
In 1966 she was awarded an OBE for her contribution to fashion, arriving for her investiture in trademark miniskirt and black gloves.
As the 60s progressed she launched hot pants onto the mass-market. They remained popular for a decade and have reappeared at regular intervals ever since.
By the 1970s she had begun moving away from clothes design and turned her attention to household goods and eventually to cosmetics.
The Designer Mini had her name on the bonnet badge
In 1988 she was responsible for the design of a limited edition Mini, complete with black and white striped upholstery and her trade-mark daisy motif in the centre of the steering wheel.
Plans to call it the Mini Quant were dropped after consumer research, so it became instead the Designer Mini, albeit with her name embossed on the bonnet badge.
Quant stepped back from the cosmetics business that bore her name when she sold it to a Japanese company in 2000, where her designs had always been popular. She was appointed a DBE in 2015.
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?'
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- Published13 April 2023
