A Mini Revolution

Sixties London was a city of, and for, the young. Creative energy, a new sense of autonomy and a taste for rebellion didn’t just drive a wedge between generations, it jimmied the gap unbridgeably wide. As the Daily Telegraph commented at the time, “Youth had captured this ancient island and taken command in a country where youth had always been kept properly in its place.”

This new London “society” was a heady mix of singers, actors, models, hairdressers and designers. And among the designers, Mary Quant was a trailblazer of the new creative class – a quietly spoken commercial powerhouse with cover-girl charisma. In 1962, Vogue called Quant and her husband Alexander Plunket Greene the “ultra front room people”.

In the ’60s, fashion was more than a passing fad. It was a call to action. Mary Quant’s career epitomised London in full swing. The city was the crucible of what Vogue editor Diana Vreeland dubbed the “youthquake”, the impact of which would radically alter the landscape of Europe and America. In the ’50s, wardrobes were dictated by Paris couturiers and designed for 30-year-olds. The shops were full of matronly clothes: black dresses, twinsets and pearls. Mary Quant said in her biography, “To me, adult appearance was very unattractive. I wanted to make clothes that were fun to wear.” She was one of the first designers to realise that her customers didn’t want to dress like their mothers. And she made clothes for them that their mothers would have looked ridiculous in.

Quant opened her first shop, Bazaar, in 1955 in the Kings Road, the promenade for London’s competing style tribes. Unable to find the clothes she wanted on the wholesale market, she soon took to making them herself. Working from her bedsit, she fast-tracked her skills with a few frantic evening classes in cutting and, unaware that fabric could be bought wholesale, invested in materials at Harrods haberdashery. 

Quant’s designs were an instant success. Within days of re-stocking, she had next-to-no merchandise left to sell. Her customers routinely stripped the store, often while she was dressing the windows. As she recalled in her biography, “People were sort of three-deep outside the window. The Royal Court Theatre people were mad about what we were doing. And it was very much the men who were bringing their girlfriends around and saying, ‘This is terrific. You must have some of this!’”

The young entrepreneur had a shrewd instinct for social change. And word soon spread beyond the “Chelsea set”. Her clothes became regular staples of magazine spreads, devoured by fashion followers in search of new trends. In this new world, the ’50s fashion categories of “formal” and “casual” ceased to have any meaning. As if to illustrate the point, a 1960 issue of Vogue photographed Mary Quant’s dark-striped pinafore with a black sweater for day, and on its own for going out to dinner.

Quant took her inspiration from the utilitarian outfits she’d worn as a child at school and at dance classes. She styled short tunic dresses with tights in bright, stand-out colours – bright scarlet, zingy orange, lush purple. And taking a leaf from the playbook of another irreverent trailblazer, Coco Chanel, she raided men’s wardrobes, reinventing comfy cardigans that were just long enough to wear as dresses, and using white plastic collars to finish sweaters and dresses. 

Her meteoric success was built on a perfect storm of demographics and cultural change. An increasing number of women were joining the workforce and had independent means. And they alone decided where their money was going. As fashion historian Colin McDowell noted, “Her customers had considerable spending power because clothes were at the centre of their existence.” The new boutique customer dressed simply to have a good time.

There is still controversy as to whether it was Mary Quant or French designer André Courrèges who invented the iconic 1960s miniskirt. Courrèges insists, “I was the man who invented the mini. Quant only commercialised the idea.” Quant’s response was typically chilled:
“I don’t mind but it’s just not as I remembered it… Maybe Courrèges did do miniskirts first, but if he did, no one wore them.” Famously, she named the skirt after her favourite car, the Mini Cooper. And regardless of official authorship, extremely short skirts and shift dresses rapidly became Quant’s trademark, and were popularised by the era’s poster girl, Twiggy, whose willowy figure helped turn super-short hemlines into an international trend.

Quant’s success was a harbinger of Britain’s potential as a global fashion superpower. By 1966 (when she was still only 32) she had been summoned to Buckingham Palace to accept an OBE. She had launched her own make-up line. She had added a collection of hosiery and underwear to complete the miniskirted Quant wardrobe. And she had spearheaded the export of the London Look in the US, reaching thousands of American girls through a partnership with JC Penney before the Beatles had even made it Stateside. Her models, wearing thigh-length dresses, stopped the traffic on Broadway. All over the world, Mary Quant became the byword for contemporary British style.

This article was taken from the Spring 2019 edition of the Goodwood Magazine.