My friend Mary Quant, the London fashion designer who defined the swinging ’60s
- Quant opened a boutique on King’s Road, Chelsea, in 1955, gave the miniskirt its name and dominated young women’s fashion in the ’60s
- Because she sold factory-made clothes for the girl next door, not couture, she has been largely left out of fashion history. A new exhibition puts that right
Mary Quant’s clothes – all bottom-skimming miniskirts and canary-yellow tights – embody the joyful optimism and bravery of youth. She burst onto the London fashion scene in 1955 when, aged just 25, she launched a groundbreaking fashion boutique on the King’s Road in Chelsea called Bazaar.
Over the next two decades, Mary dressed the girls of Chelsea in ice-cream-coloured pelmet dresses, thigh-baring skirts, skinny-ribbed black jumpers, and strawberry-red ankle boots. In dreary post-war London, she ensured women could finally stop dressing like their mothers.
Mary was a revolutionary; she transformed the British fashion scene by turning these young women into the arbiters of style, dethroning the Parisian couturiers who had dominated the industry for the first half of the century.
I feel extremely privileged to have known her during my own teenage years, and to have dipped my first toe into the terrifyingly adult world of fashion and beauty under the guidance of one of the industry’s greatest rebels.
