Mary Quant, fashion designer, 1930-2023

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The thing about British designer Mary Quant, says Edward Sexton, the Savile Row tailor who helped shape the look of the Swinging Sixties in London, is that she was “immediately recognisable. She dressed in a very sexy way, short skirts . . . She stood out in a crowd.”

Quant, who has died aged 93, parlayed her five-pointed Vidal Sassoon chop, self-made tunic dresses and gumball-coloured tights into a global business spanning ready-to-wear clothing and hosiery, and a cosmetics line.

Widely credited for popularising the mini skirt in the early 1960s, her then-shockingly short skirts and waistless dresses were a welcome departure from the cinched waists and long, full skirts favoured at the time. The innovative designs helped put British fashion on the map.

“She gave young women a new visual language, and the space to be themselves,” says Jenny Lister, co-curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2019-2020 Mary Quant exhibition. “She didn’t promote herself as a feminist but, the way she lived and worked, it was at the bottom of everything she did.”

“Before her designs, there were no real clothes for teenagers,” the model Twiggy recalled in a 2019 Vogue essay. “If you look at girls in the ‘50s, most of them are dressed like their mothers. She changed all of that.”

Mary Quant was born in 1930 in Blackheath, south London to two Welsh schoolteachers who discouraged her from pursuing a fashion career. She enrolled in an illustration course at Goldsmiths, where she met her future husband, Alexander Plunket Greene. In 1955, she, Plunket Greene and their friend, the lawyer Archie McNair opened a smart basement restaurant — Alexander’s, on the King’s Road, which fast became a favourite of the burgeoning “Chelsea Set” (Brigitte Bardot and the Beatles also dined there). On the ground floor was a shop they called Bazaar, where Quant’s fashion career was born.

Mary Quant with models showing her shoe creations © PA

Quant set about filling the shop with clothes, first bought wholesale from other designers and then — frustrated because she couldn’t find precisely what she wanted — of her own design. She adapted existing patterns and attended evening classes to learn the fundamentals of cutting. Her clothes were made in small batches to help pay for the next rolls of fabric, which meant the shop almost always had something new. Even at the height of Quant’s popularity, she typically only made 100 to 200 copies of a single garment, says Nigel Bamforth, who formerly managed production for her diffusion line, Ginger Group.

“The quality was extremely good,” Bamforth recalls, landing, price-wise, between couture and Biba, the lower-priced fashion chain that launched in 1964. “Duchesses would shop in her shop and also people who worked as secretaries,” says the V&A’s Lister.

But careful marketing by the trio also played a role in the brand’s success. Quant’s photo was frequently splashed across the papers as the inventor of the mini skirt. So was that of Sixties “it” model Twiggy, who became the unofficial second face of the label. Designs were given playful names — “Legs Downwards” trousers, the “Cad” dress, “7 Up” shorts — with elegant black-and-white inner labels that mimicked those sewn into haute couture garments.

The stores were informal and fun, with loud music, arresting window displays and parties that stretched into the early hours. “She really changed not just how women dressed, but how women shopped,” says Dennis Nothdruft, head of exhibitions at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum. “These ideas of boutiques and in-store events and fashion shows in stores, it became an experience. It changed how people consumed fashion.”

The business expanded through a 1962 design contract with US department store chain JC Penney and, in 1963, the lower-priced diffusion line Ginger Group. In 1966, Quant was presented with an OBE for fashion, which she accepted wearing a mini dress. In 2015, she was made a dame and earlier this year was appointed to the Companions of Honour by King Charles III.

Mary Quant parlayed her five-pointed Vidal Sassoon chop, self-made tunic dresses and gumball-coloured tights into a global business spanning ready-to-wear clothing and hosiery, and a cosmetics line © Mirrorpix/Getty Images

Associates describe her as charming and exuberant, though painfully shy in public. “She would prefer to hide behind anyone, and for interviews on the radio or television, she sort of died of embarrassment,” says Lister.

In 2000, the designer left the company she co-founded and sold her remaining shares to her Japanese licensing partners. Her husband died in 1990, aged 57. She is survived by a son, Orlando.

“The thing I love about Quant is that she set out to run a boutique, and not finding things she wanted, she made them,” says Nothdruft. “The whole Quant empire came from that understanding.”