British fashion designer Mary Quant has died at the age of 93, PA Media reported on Thursday. The agency said she “died peacefully at home in Surrey, UK this morning”.
Quant was credited with designing the mini skirt that helped to define the swinging 60s. She was “one of the most internationally recognized fashion designers of the 20th Century and an outstanding innovator,” her family said. “She opened her first shop Bazaar in the Kings Road in 1955 and her far-sighted and creative talents quickly established a unique contribution to British fashion.”
Former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman tweeted: “RIP Dame Mary Quant. A leader of fashion but also in female entrepreneurship – a visionary who was much more than a great haircut.”
The Victoria & Albert Museum said: “It’s impossible to overstate Quant’s contribution to fashion. She represented the joyful freedom of 1960s fashion, and provided a new role model for young women. Fashion today owes so much to her trailblazing vision.”
Who was Mary Quant?
Dame Barbara Mary Plunket Greene or May Quant was born on 11 February 1930, in Blackheath, London. Her parents were teachers. Quant went to Blackheath High School.
After finishing high school, Qaunt wanted to study fashion. However, her parents dissuaded her and she instead made her study illustration and art education at Goldsmiths College. She graduated with a degree in 1953. However her love for fashion continued and after college, she apprenticed with Erik, a Mayfair milliner.
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She started her new boutique and originally sold clothing sourced from wholesalers. However, Quant’s designs were riskier and more unique than standard styles of the time and started garnering more attention from media like Harper’s Bazaar. An American manufacturer purchased some of her designs.
Her designs represented the cultural shift from the utilitarian wartime of the late 40s to the energy of the 50s and 60s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Quant was one of only two London-based designers offering youthful clothes for young people.
She has been credited with inventing the miniskirt, which is said to be defining fashion of the 1960s. However, this claim has been challenged by others.
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Quant said: “It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the miniskirt. 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.'”
She gave the miniskirt its name, after her favorite make of car, the Mini. She said that the women who wore mini skirts “are curiously feminine, but their femininity lies in their attitude rather than in their appearance … She enjoys being noticed, but wittily. She is lively—positive—opinionated.”
In her later career, Quant designed short shorts and was the forerunner of hotpants which quickly became all the rage. In the 1970s and 1980s, she turned her focus on household goods and make-up rather than just her clothing lines, including the duvet, which she claims to have invented.
