MARY QUANT - The woman who made the sixties swing

She invented the miniskirt, enraged businessmen and would liberate a generation. Now a new documentary explores how revolutionary designer Dame Mary Quant created a legacy that changed the way the world dressed.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

When the fashion revolution came, it was young, fun and six inches above the knee. With parrot-green tights and rubber shoes the colour of poppies, it emancipated women’s legs and spirits. The visionary who unleashed this era of liberation was Mary Quant, a slip of a woman with a geometric haircut that slashed daringly across her eyebrows and bared her neck. Shy of public attention, Mary nevertheless had a resolute self-belief and a vision so clear and unique she has been named alongside Coco Chanel and Christian Dior as one of the most significant designers of the 20th century.

“I think the point of fashion is to not get bored looking at somebody,” Mary says in her characteristically soft voice in new documentary Quant. “I didn’t like clothes the way they were. They weren’t for me. I was, from a very young age, trying to make my own clothes which were very strongly the look that I still love.”

Cultural revolutions are typically led by the youth taking to the streets with banners and chants. In King’s Road, Chelsea, in the late 1950s, the banging was done by the tweedy men of London, hitting the plate glass window of Mary Quant’s boutique, Bazaar, with their umbrellas. In their Savile Row bowler hats and lace-up Oxfords they shouted at Mary that her clothes were “obscene, disgusting, degenerate”.

“They were intimidated by it and threatened,” says Quant director Sadie Frost. “Things were very stuck in certain systems and ways. The ‘youthquake’ came along and shook things up and I think people in the establishment who’d had things done a certain way before didn’t like it.”