It’s a sad day for anyone who’s ever wiggled into a miniskirt, as news breaks of the death of visionary designer Mary Quant. She was 93.
Born to Welsh parents in 1930, Quant grew up in Blackheath, South London, and showed a flair for creativity from a young age. In the 1950s she undertook a diploma in illustration and art education at Goldsmiths. It was here she met her husband Alexander Plunket Greene, who helped her get her eponymous label off the ground.
In 1955, she opened her first ‘Bazaar’ boutique on Chelsea’s King’s Road, where she set about revolutionising the fashion of the time – hoicking up hemlines and injecting off-the-rack clothes with a sense of playfulness and youth that it had previously lacked in the post-war era.
By the time the 60s rolled around, Quant’s Bazaar was the go-to for a new, care-free generation who dared to play with proportion, colour, and gender. And while it was contested who actually invented the miniskirt during this period, Quant became emblematic of the dynamic style which liberated women from the heavy silhouettes that came before.
With the mini sweeping the globe in the years that followed, Quant was also widely regarded as the inventor of hot pants – her tiny, barely-there shorts layered over colourful tights and matched with peppy go-go boots throughout the swinging 60s. Quant revealed that the length of her garments was largely dictated by her customers, with many shoppers pushing the designer to take her hemlines higher and higher.
Going beyond just boutique, Bazaar became a cultural destination, filled with design curios, to which mods from London and beyond would flock to hang out, drink, and socialise. Oftentimes, it was difficult to find stock in there, as eager fashion fans would clear it out no sooner had the clothes racks been replenished.
From early on in her career, Quant was renowned for her angular, Vidal Sassoon-coiffed bob. A similar trailblazer when it came to the liberation of women, Quant and Sassoon struck up a lifelong friendship. Though warned by many she’d regret chopping off her long, thick brunette hair, in 1964 she took the plunge. “We [women] found the freedom to swim in the sea, drive in an open-top car, walk in the rain, and then just shake our head to look good again,” she told The Guardian in 2012. “Vidal Sassoon, the pill, and the mini changed everything. For me, he produced the perfect cap on my leggy mini skirt designs.”