THE Sixties would not have happened without fashion designer Dame Mary Quant, who has died aged 93.
As broadcaster Joan Bakewell put it last night: “Mary Quant changed my life and that of my generation . . . not only by how we looked but by how we lived.”
And model Pattie Boyd, who married Beatle George Harrison in 1966 in coats designed by Mary, called her a “creative, fun genius”.
Christine Hamilton described Mary in a Tweet as a “truly seismic character who changed the face of fashion and make-up.
She added: “For those of us old enough to have been young in the Swinging Sixties she was a breath of fresh air, an icon of change and youth.”
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Mary was the beating heart of fashionable London. She was there with The Beatles, she was there with the photographer David Bailey and there with the famous hairdresser Vidal Sassoon.
In fact, it was Sassoon who gave Quant her legendary bob. In a flash, he gave London an image that travelled around the world, telling everyone that it was the place to be.
Mary’s trademark do was one of the first wash-and-go cuts. Before it, stylish hair meant hours in rollers, buckets of lacquer, or epic sessions under the hairdryer.
Sassoon said that his inspiration for the look was to cut hair “like she cut material. No fuss. No ornamentation. Just a neat swinging line”.
Changing the world by changing your haircut seems terribly boring these days, but in the 1960s it was positively revolutionary.
Mary was the most important fashion designer of the decade, inventing the miniskirt and, bizarrely, being responsible for making Britain a nation of duvet-lovers.
This was the time of sexual emancipation, and Mary was one of the first people to exploit it.
Rising hemlines
Model Twiggy may have helped popularise the trend, but it was Mary who designed it — and named it in honour of her favourite car.
Known as the “Modmother of the 1960s”, she epitomised the decade’s style, clad in her signature playful clothes and boots, with huge painted eyes, fake freckles and that bob.
While the introduction of “above the knee” skirts was a gradual process, it was Mary who acknowledged how the trend for rising hemlines was influenced by an emerging London street style, and a wider cultural shift towards informality and the break-down of social codes.
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“It was the girls on the King’s Road [in Chelsea] who really invented the miniskirt,” she said. “I just gave it a name.
“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’.”
Born Barbara Mary in Blackheath in 1930, Quant was evacuated to a village in Kent during the Second World War. But she was desperate to get back to London.
Even as a schoolgirl she knew the capital was where she needed to be.
Her parents, school-teachers Jack and Mildred, were both initially reluctant to allow their daughter to study fashion at college, believing it would not lead to a proper job. But what did they know.
Not only could Mary see how society was changing after the war, she was part of the cool London crowd, who were more interested in going out and having fun.
With her aristocratic husband Alexander Plunket Greene — the father of her son Orlando, 53 — she opened trendy clothing store, Bazaar, on the King’s Road.
Designed by art student friends, the youth-friendly shop was a world apart from the city’s musty, old tailors.
Mary filled it with the outfits that she and her bohemian friends were wearing, “a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories,” as she said herself. “Short, flared skirts and pinafores, knee socks and tights, funky jewellery and berets in all colours.”
Mary was good at marketing too. She bought a mirror that made customers look taller and thinner and helped stock to sell out in just ten days.
She recalled: “We had a different way of selling. There would always be a bottle of white wine on the counter.”
Music blared and the store was open late into the night, like a club.
It was the miniskirt that made her name, though. “City gents in bowler hats beat on our shop window with their umbrellas shouting ‘immoral!’ and ‘disgusting!’ at the sight of our miniskirts, but customers poured in to buy,” she said.
In 1966, she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire for her contribution to British exports — and sales that would soon reach $20million.
When she toured the United States with a new collection, she was welcomed like a fifth Beatle. At one point she was so popular that she required police protection. Mary was made a Dame in 2015.
I was having lunch with Caroline Rush, the CEO of the British Fashion Council yesterday when reports of the designer’s death at her home in Surrey came through. She was rocked by the news.
“This is such terrible news,” Caroline said, fighting back the tears. “British fashion is always pushing boundaries and she was a designer who pushed boundaries way more than others.
She was one of the most influential designers of them all, easily as important as Vivienne Westwood, Giorgio Armani or Coco Chanel.
“She was a true original, and someone who made you feel proud to be British.
“She completely changed the way in which women dressed.”
Also at the table yesterday was Harold Tillman, the former chairman of the British Fashion Council. He was equally moved, as he had known her well in the 1970s.
“Britain had never known anyone like her,” he said, again with a tear in his eye.
Cheerful packaging
“Not only did she make terrific clothes which revolutionised women’s fashion for a generation, but she became a great champion of the industry.
“When she travelled abroad she was treated like a superstar, because that’s what she was. A real fashion superstar.”
Mary’s miniskirt became an international symbol of women’s liberation, and 21st Century fashion owes a debt of freedom and creativity to the trailblazer. Basically, she revolutionised fashion by making it fun.
She said: “I was born never wanting to grow up. I just didn’t like wearing grown-up clothes.”
Before Mary came along, most women were stuck with stockings and the garters that held them up (and required a long skirt to hide them), but she began selling tights.
And instead of just making black or (flesh-coloured) “American Tan”, she produced a variety of bright colours.
In 1966 she started designing hotpants. Like her tights, they were invented with the idea of solving the issue of modesty.
As Quant explained at the time: “It’s a difficult business sitting down nowadays.”
She was always invested in the “whole look”, and introduced her own line of make-up, because she felt cosmetics were lagging behind.
She brought in bright colours for eyelids, lips and nails, with names like Banana Split, and sold them in cheerful packaging.
In 1967, Mary developed a waterproof mascara called Cry Baby, although she had to fight to get lab technicians to investigate this possibility.
She recalled in her autobiography: “They just didn’t see the need. They said, ‘Why do you want it? Women swim with their heads out of the water’. I replied: “That’s because of their make-up!”
As well as these sartorial wins she also helped develop seamless bras, trousers for women and, in 1971, the modern duvet.
Mary claimed she introduced them to Britain, saying: “We lugged them back from Norway.”
When asked recently how she felt when she looked back at her life, Mary once said: “I think to myself, ‘You lucky woman. How did you have all this fun?’”
