Inspirations & Icons - Mary Quant
How did Mary Quant change fashion?
Inventive, opinionated, commercially minded and a huge influence in the evolution of fashion.
Mary Quant was one of the most iconic fashion designers of the 1960s.
She popularised super-high hemlines and other daring looks that were critical to the development of the 'Swinging Sixties' scene.
Quant wanted "relaxed clothes suited to normal life". Combining short tunic dresses with tights in bright, stand-out colours – scarlet, ginger, prune and grape. She created bold, high-fashion versions of the practical outfits she'd worn as a child at school.
Writing in 2012, Quant recalled how she discovered the 'house-wear' market in the US around 1965 and decided to bring this new concept to Europe. She designed "a collection of jersey tops and hotpants in striped jersey-knit fabrics with matching bras, pants, socks, leg warmers and minis – all using knitted fabrics of various thicknesses and weights". The idea of special clothes for lounging in at home was quite a change in mindset for most of the British public – who only had the ubiquitous dressing gown until then.
She made tights so fashionable, (stockings were pretty much ditched). An article in the Sunday Times from 1973 suggested that while Quant hadn't invented fashion tights, she was the reason most women wore them. The distinctive Mary Quant packaging, with its instantly recognisable ‘Daisy’ logo, helped such products to stand out among competitors, and were sold well into the 1980s.
I have always admired her bold use of block colour and have vivid memories of dressing up in a stretch terry towelling playsuit that my mother still had from the 70’s.
There was a fabulous retrospective at the V&A in 2019 that celebrated her career. It was a brilliant example of her creativity and the empowerment of women and significant source of inspiration for the So English collection.
Sophie x
Postscript … Sadly, Dame Mary Quant left us on the13th of April aged just 93. A genuine maverick, she will be missed.
