Equal parts practical and daring: how Mary Quant created look for a new way of living
O nly the Beatles are more closely tied to the legend that is London’s swinging 60s than Mary Quant. If the Fab Four wrote the soundtrack, Quant designed the look.Quant, who has died peacefully at home in Surrey aged 93, claimed to have invented the miniskirt. André Courrèges might have quibbledwith this, but there is no doubt that it was Quant’s vision of what the miniskirt stood for that made it not just a piece of clothing, but a symbol of a whole new way of living.
In Quant’s hands, the miniskirt – equal parts practical and daring – was shorthand for a new attitude. She always said that she named it after her beloved Mini Cooper. Wearing a miniskirt was her shortcut to life in the fast lane.
Born Barbara Mary Quant to two schoolteachers in south London in 1930, the designer graduated from Goldsmiths in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.
Her first shop, Bazaar, opened in London in 1955, just a year after rationing had ended. Finally emerging from the horrors of the second world war, the capital was in search of a new energy – and Quant had it in spades. She knew instinctively that a new generation wanted to break from history, to live differently from their parents. And she knew that a new attitude needed a new wardrobe.
In the spirit of female liberty that she brought to clothes, Quant was an heir to Coco Chanel. Her contemporaries were the first generation of women who had access to the contraceptive pill and, with it, the freedom to take control of their careers and lives.
Quant, who once described the mini as representing “life and tremendous opportunity”, also added pockets to skirts and dresses, to free young women from having to carry handbags, and pioneered tights, rather than stockings, to go with
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