Mary Quant, ‘Miniskirt Mom’, Dies at 93
Mary Quant, the visionary fashion designer whose colorful miniskirts symbolized Swinging London in the 1960s and influenced youth culture around the world, has died aged 93.
Global Vogue editor Hamish Bowles was keen to emphasize Quant’s place in fashion history.
“She was the right person with the right sensibility in the right place at the right time. She appeared on the scene right at the height of the ’60s,” he said.
Not everyone fell in love with the short skirt.
Coco Chanel said the miniskirt was “indecent”, while Sophia Loren publicly stated that the short piece “destroyed the feminine mystique”.
Bright colors and innovative fabrics
The designer came of age in post-war London, a place where, she said, “most people returned to their gardens and allotments hoping that life would go back to the way it was before the hostilities”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the young designer who employed bright colors and innovative fabrics garnered a lot of attention when she started out. After all, as she described it, the city was still full of gentlemen in bowler hats carrying umbrellas. “It was into this world that I launched my new ideas about fashion.”
And they were new. After opening her boutique, Bazaar, on the King’s Road in the early ’60s, Quant became known for her innovative vision of femininity, which was youthful, colorful and, above all, modern. Her ideas about what women are most suited to fashion may have been influenced by her proximity in age to most of her clients.
With her short shorts and knee-high boots, Mary Quant championed the modern aesthetic, who traded sheer tights for shorts and stiff bras for flowing baby doll dresses. The look reflected and ignited a period of cultural rebellion that would grip England.
‘Shorter, shorter’
A trendsetter throughout the “Swinging Sixties”, the designer harnessed the zeitgeist and helped contribute, at least stylistically, to the women’s movement by creating a powerful role model for the working woman. In creating the tailored miniskirt and pants, Mary Quant created a uniform that redefines what women wear, a loud and proud style that proclaims: I’ll wear what I like, thank you very much.
“I was making clothes that were easy, youthful, and simple that you could move in, that you could run and jump in, and we made them the length the customer wanted,” Quant said. As a young girl, she said, she used to make higher and higher hems on her grandmother’s skirts. But at Bazaar, her clients were the ones driving the trend that Quant eventually christened the miniskirt mom. “I wore them really short and customers would say, ‘Shorter, shorter.'”
Always taking chances as she made her name as a designer, Quant embraced new textiles and fabrics, as well as mass production techniques that revolutionized the streets and helped make her a household name, making her clothes more accessible to all. . “Snobbery has gone out of fashion and in our stores you will find duchesses fighting typists to buy the same dresses,” she told Vogue. as saying.
The designer behind the iconic miniskirt turned her eye to accessories in the late ’60s, creating PVC clogs and ankle boots, pairing them with bright raincoats. By the end of the decade, however, she gave up working in clothing and lent her name to a line of cosmetics – a line that still exists today, although the 85-year-old is long since retired.
On display at the V&A
Quant’s popularity in England and her influence in the fashion world can still be felt more than 60 years after the designer’s debut.
An exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, which opened almost four years ago, aims to trace the designer’s career and her influence on style, displaying objects throughout Quant’s career.
to create the exhibit, the museum urged people to rummage through their closets and add a unique piece to the collection; received over 800 garments and accessories to choose from. Asked by the exhibition’s curators what she thought of her work at the time, Quant replied: “It was a wonderfully exciting time, and despite the frantic hard work, we had a lot of fun. We didn’t necessarily realize that what we were creating was pioneering, we were simply too busy seizing every opportunity and embracing the results before rushing on to the next challenge!”
This article was updated from a previous article published on May 4, 2019.
Source: DW
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