Mary Quant was a fashion designer who styled the Swinging Sixties
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The “Quant” of Her Childhood: How Mary Quant Met, After 17 Years on the Apprenticeship of a High School Principal Fashion Teacher
“I didn’t like the way the clothes were made.” I didn’t like the clothes I inherited from a cousin. They weren’t me,” Quant explained in a 1985 interview on Thames TV. What she liked, she said, was the style of a young girl in her dancing class. She was thorough and completely complete. And her face! It’s always been in my head. Black tights. White ankle socks… and black patent leather shoes with a button on top. The skirt was not long.
Quant’s parents did not approve of fashion as a vocation, so she attended art school at Goldsmiths College, studied illustration and met and married an aristocratic fellow student, Alexander Plunket Greene. With partner Archie McNair, they opened a business in Chelsea in 1955, already stirring with what would become the “Youthquake” of the 1960s.
“Because the Chelsea girl — she had the best legs in the world, ” Quant declared in the Thames TV interview. She wanted short skirts and a cardigan.
Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy were among the top British models of the era and were helped elevate by Quant, which created a makeup line inspired by their unconventional application techniques. She included an innovation of her own: waterproof mascara. Notably, she also hired Black models at a time when diversity was unusual in magazines and on runaways.
A person who worked for British Vogue is paying tribute to Dame Mary Quant. A leader of fashion and entrepreneurship, a man who was much more than a great haircut.
Her clothes, as she made clear in Sadie Frost’s 2021 documentary “Quant” about her life, were not meant for an elite of “stately ladies,” but offered a colorful break from the stiff sartorial codes of the previous decade, including the polished style of Christian Dior’s first collection, “the New Look.”
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