Mary Quant, British Fashion Revolutionary, Dies
at 93
Known as the mother of the miniskirt, clad in her
signature play clothes and boots, with huge painted eyes, fake freckles and a
bob, she epitomized London’s Swinging Sixties.
Penelope
Green
By Penelope
Green
April 13,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/fashion/mary-quant-dead.html
Mary Quant,
the British designer who revolutionized fashion and epitomized the style of the
Swinging Sixties, a playful, youthful ethos that sprang from the streets, not a
Paris atelier, died on Thursday at her home in Surrey, in southern England.
Known as the mother of the miniskirt, she was 93.
Her family
announced the death in a statement.
England was
emerging from its postwar privations when, in 1955, Ms. Quant and her
aristocratic boyfriend, Alexander Plunket Greene, opened a boutique called
Bazaar on London’s King’s Road, in the heart of Chelsea. Ms. Quant filled it
with the outfits that she and her bohemian friends were wearing, “a
bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories,” as she wrote in an autobiography,
“Quant by Quant” (1966) — short flared skirts and pinafores, knee socks and
tights, funky jewelry and berets in all colors.
Young women
at the time were turning their backs on the corseted shapes of their mothers,
with their nipped waists and ship’s-prow chests — the shape of Dior, which had
dominated since 1947. They disdained the uniform of the establishment — the
signifiers of class and age telegraphed by the lacquered helmets of hair, the
twin sets and heels, and the matchy-matchy accessories — the model for which
was typically in her 30s, not a young gamine like Ms. Quant.
When she
couldn’t find the pieces she wanted, Ms. Quant made them herself, buying fabric
at retail from the luxury department store Harrods and stitching them in her
bed-sit, where her Siamese cats had a habit of eating the Butterick patterns
she worked from.
Profits
were elusive in those early years, but the boutique was a hit from the get-go,
with young women stripping the place bare on a near-daily basis, sometimes
grabbing new clothing from Ms. Quant’s arms as she headed into the store. She
and Mr. Plunket Greene ran it like the coffee bars they frequented: as a
hangout and a party at all hours, with a background of jazz.
And they
made their window displays a performance, too, with mannequins designed by a
friend to look like the young women who were shopping there — “the birds,” in
Ms. Quant’s words, using the parlance of the times — figures with sharp
cheekbones, mod haircuts and coltish legs, sometimes turned upside down or
sprayed white, some with bald heads and round sunglasses, clad in striped
bathing suits and strumming guitars.
Amateurs at
accounting, along with everything else, the couple stashed their bills in piles,
paying from the top down. Vendors were often paid twice, or not at all,
depending on their place in the pile.
A decade
later, Mary Quant was a global brand, with licenses all over the world — she
was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1966 for her
contribution to British exports — and sales that would soon reach $20 million.
When she toured the United States with a new collection, she was greeted like a
fifth Beatle; at one point she required police protection. Newspapers eagerly printed
her aperçus and declarations: “Quant Expects Higher Hem,” The Associated Press
declared in the winter of 1966, adding that Ms. Quant had “predicted today that
the miniskirt was here to stay.”
There was a
Mary Quant line at J.C. Penney and boutiques in New York department stores.
There was Mary Quant makeup — for women and men — packaged in paint boxes,
eyelashes you could buy by the yard, and lingerie, tights, shoes, outerwear and
furs. By the 1970s, there were bedsheets, stationery, paint, housewares and a
Mary Quant doll, Daisy, named for Ms. Quant’s signature daisy logo.
“The
celebrity designer is an accepted part of the modern fashion system today, but
Mary was rare in the ’60s as a brand ambassador for her own clothes and brand,”
Jenny Lister, a co-curator of a 2019 retrospective of Ms. Quant’s work at the
Victoria & Albert Museum in London, told The New York Times. “She didn’t
just sell quirky British cool, she actually was quirky British cool, and the
ultimate Chelsea girl.”
“I grew up
not wanting to grow up,” Ms. Quant once said. “Growing up seemed terrible. To
me, it was awful. Children were free and sane, and grown-ups were hideous.”
Barbara
Mary Quant was born on Feb. 11, 1930, in Blackheath, southeast London. Her
parents, John and Mildred (Jones) Quant, were Welsh teachers who came from
mining families and were determined that their two children, Mary and Tony,
should follow conventional career paths.
But Mary
wanted to study fashion. When she received a scholarship to the arts-focused
Goldsmiths College (now Goldsmiths, University of London), her parents made a
compromise: She could attend if she took her degree in art education (she
studied illustration). There, she met Mr. Plunket Greene, a well-born eccentric
(the philosopher Bertrand Russell was a cousin, as was the Duke of Bedford) who
wore his mother’s gold shantung silk pajamas to class on the rare occasions he
attended and played jazz on the trumpet — a character straight out of an Evelyn
Waugh novel (Waugh was a family friend).
They became
inseparable. They delighted in pranks and the attention they drew for their
outfits; Mr. Plunket Greene once painted his bare chest to mimic the buttons on
a dress shirt. Passers-by, Ms. Quant recalled in her memoir, sneered, “God,
look at this Modern Youth!” a title the pair embraced: “Shall we be Modern
Youth tonight?”
They soon
met Archie McNair, a lawyer who had become a portrait photographer and who ran
a coffee bar under his studio in Chelsea. The three decided to open a business
together. Each man put up 5,000 pounds, and they bought a building at 138a
King’s Road. Ms. Quant, who was working for a milliner, quit her job.
Thanks to
Bazaar, King’s Road became the epicenter of British fashion, and London the
epicenter of the so-called youthquake, as Vogue put it at the time. Ms. Quant
was its avatar, garbed in her signature play clothes and boots, with huge
painted eyes, a pale face dotted with fake freckles and a distinctive bob that
would make its creator, Vidal Sassoon, as famous as she. His wash-and-wear cut
was as much a death blow to the laborious bouffant as the miniskirt was to the
twin set. “Vidal put the top on it,” Ms. Quant liked to say.
Early on,
Ms. Quant embraced mass production and synthetic materials and fast fashion
that could be bought, and discarded, by the young women for whom it was
designed.
Captivated
by PVC plastic-coated cotton, she made raincoats that seemed slick with water.
She made molded plastic boots in bright colors with clear “ice cube” heels and
tops that zipped off.
“Why can’t
people see what a machine is capable of doing itself instead of making it copy
what the hand does?” Ms. Quant told The New York Times Magazine in 1967. “What
we should do is take the chemicals and make the fabric direct; we ought to blow
clothes the way people blow glass. It’s ridiculous that fabric should be cut up
to make a flat thing to go ’round a round person.”
She added:
“It’s ridiculous, in this age of machines to continue to make clothes by hand.
The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the
young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in
it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”
Ms. Quant
and Mr. Plunket Greene married in 1957; he died in 1990. Ms. Quant is survived
by their son, Orlando Plunket Greene; her brother, Tony Quant; and three
grandchildren.
In 2000,
Ms. Quant stepped down as director of Mary Quant Ltd., having been bought out —
or pushed out, as some reports claimed — by the company’s managing director. In
2009, she was honored by the Royal Mail with her own postage stamp, featuring a
model wearing a black Mary Quant flared mini. In 2015, Ms. Quant was made a
dame. The storefront once occupied by Bazaar is now a juice bar, above which a
plaque now commemorates Dame Mary Quant.
In the
spring of 2019, when the Victoria & Albert Museum showed its retrospective
of her work, a vibrant exhibition of 120 pieces from her heyday, the curators
included a montage of photographs and memories from the thousands of women who
had answered their call to share their beloved Mary Quant pieces — along with
tales of how they had worn them as liberated young women heading to job
interviews and first dates, a powerful tribute to Ms. Quant’s legacy and the
nascent feminism of her times.
“I forget
all my clothes, but I still remember my first Mary Quants,” Joan Juliet Buck,
the author and former editor of French Vogue who grew up in ’60s-era London,
said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. “The pumpkin jumper and the
aqua lamé miniskirt culottes and the falsely-little-girl beige crepe dress with
puffed sleeves and pansies scattered below the smocked band under the breasts
that drove men mad, while I had no idea. She locked into that
woman-as-little-girl ethos that made the miniskirt inevitable, and
indisputable.”
But did she
invent it? André Courrèges, the space age French designer, long claimed credit
for its creation, and it is true that he was steadily raising his hemlines in
the early ’60s. But Ms. Quant, as the fashion historian Valerie Steele has
pointed out, was slicing up her hems from the moment Bazaar opened back in
1955, mostly in response to her customers, who clamored for ever shorter
skirts.
“We were at
the beginning of a tremendous renaissance in fashion,” Ms. Quant wrote in her
1966 autobiography. “It was not happening because of us. It was simply that, as
things turned out, we were a part of it.
“Good
designers — like clever newspapermen — know that to have any influence they
must keep in step with public needs,” she wrote, “and that intangible
‘something in the air.’ I just happened to start when ‘that something in the
air’ was coming to a boil.”
Amanda
Holpuch contributed reporting.
Corrections
were made on April 13, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary misstated how
old Ms. Quant was in 1955, She was 25, not 21. (As the obituary correctly
states, she was born in February 1930.)
An earlier
version of this obituary misstated the name of an autobiography Ms. Quant
published in 1966. It is “Quant by Quant,” not “Quant on Quant.”
When we
learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error,
please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Penelope
Green is a reporter on the Obituaries desk and a feature writer. She has been a
reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times, an early
iteration of Style, and a story editor at the Sunday magazine. @greenpnyt
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