The thing about British designer Mary Quant, says Edward Sexton, the Savile Row tailor who helped shape the look of the Swinging Sixties in London, is that she was “immediately recognisable. She dressed in a very sexy way, short skirts . . . She stood out in a crowd.”
Quant was a 93-year-old woman who turned her Vidal Sassoon five-pointed chop, homemade tunic dresses, gumball coloured tights, and self-made clothes into a worldwide business that included ready-to-wear apparel, hosiery as well as a cosmetics brand.
In the early 1960s her shockingly short dresses and skirts with no waist were an exciting departure from the long full skirts of the time and the tightened waists. These innovative designs put British fashion in the spotlight.
“She gave young women a new visual language, and the space to be themselves,” says Jenny Lister, co-curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2019-2020 Mary Quant exhibition. “She didn’t promote herself as a feminist but, the way she lived and worked, it was at the bottom of everything she did.”
“Before her designs, there were no real clothes for teenagers,” the model Twiggy recalled in a 2019 Vogue essay. “If you look at girls in the ‘50s, most of them are dressed like their mothers. She changed all of that.”
Mary Quant, born 1930 in Blackheath in south London, was raised by two Welsh teachers who tried to discourage her from becoming a model. She took an illustration class at Goldsmiths where she met Alexander Plunket Greene. In 1955, she, Plunket Greene and their friend, the lawyer Archie McNair opened a smart basement restaurant — Alexander’s, on the King’s Road, which fast became a favourite of the burgeoning “Chelsea Set” (Brigitte Bardot and the Beatles also dined there). On the ground floor was a shop they called Bazaar, where Quant’s fashion career was born.
Quant set about filling the shop with clothes, first bought wholesale from other designers and then — frustrated because she couldn’t find precisely what she wanted — of her own design. She took evening classes and adapted patterns to help her learn how to cut. The clothes she made were small to pay for new rolls of fabric. This meant that the shop always had something fresh. Even at the height of Quant’s popularity, she typically only made 100 to 200 copies of a single garment, says Nigel Bamforth, who formerly managed production for her diffusion line, Ginger Group.
“The quality was extremely good,” Bamforth recalls, landing, price-wise, between couture and Biba, the lower-priced fashion chain that launched in 1964. “Duchesses would shop in her shop and also people who worked as secretaries,” says the V&A’s Lister.
But careful marketing by the trio also played a role in the brand’s success. Quant’s photo was frequently splashed across the papers as the inventor of the mini skirt. So was that of Sixties “it” model Twiggy, who became the unofficial second face of the label. Designs were given playful names — “Legs Downwards” trousers, the “Cad” dress, “7 Up” shorts — with elegant black-and-white inner labels that mimicked those sewn into haute couture garments.
There was a casual and playful atmosphere in the stores, complete with loud music and window displays that were eye-catching. Parties lasted until early morning. “She really changed not just how women dressed, but how women shopped,” says Dennis Nothdruft, head of exhibitions at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum. “These ideas of boutiques and in-store events and fashion shows in stores, it became an experience. It changed how people consumed fashion.”
A 1962 contract for design with US department-store chain JC Penney, and in 1963 the Ginger Group diffusion line, which was more cost-effective, helped Quant expand her business. Quant accepted an OBE award for fashion in 1966 while wearing a miniature dress. Quant was made a lady in 2015. She was later appointed as a Companion of Honour to honour by King Charles III.
She is described as exuberant and charming by her associates, but painfully shy when in public. “She would prefer to hide behind anyone, and for interviews on the radio or television, she sort of died of embarrassment,” says Lister.
In 2000 the designer sold all of her shares in the Japanese licensing company that she founded. Her husband, who was 57 years old at the time of his death in 1990 died. Orlando is her only son.
“The thing I love about Quant is that she set out to run a boutique, and not finding things she wanted, she made them,” says Nothdruft. “The whole Quant empire came from that understanding.”