There’ ssomething about Mary something about Mary
V&A EXHIBITION PAYS TRIBUTE TO 60s FASHION ICON
Her miniskirts changed clothes shopping and now museum offers a glimpse of the glitz and the glamour
AFTER five months in mothballs, Dundee’s V&A is reopening with a glamorous exhibition dedicated to Mary Quant. Swinging London, with its bright colours, mini skirts and geometric haircuts is the cheering visual stimulation a post-lockdown audience needs. The exhibition was a huge hit at the V&A in London, with 400,000 going to see the dresses that scandalised the generation who fought in the war. It was the brainchild of Mary’s former press officer, Heather Tilbury, who felt that her former boss was being written out of fashion history. She said: “Mary had fallen off the radar. She was marginalised by the media and the industry. They’d talk about Vivienne Westwood and other designers, or Biba. “Mary was at the vanguard. This didn’t seem to be represented in historical facts I was picking up.” Turns out she was pushing at an open door – the V&A was already planning a major Quant show. And Heather could not be more thrilled with the way the exhibition came together.
She said: “They have done the most marvellous job. Mary’s legacy to today’s fashion is so vividly displayed.
“People relate to the ideas, the colours, the freedom of movement the clothes provided.
“You could run for a bus, you could jump, you could go dancing, then straight off to work. That’s what these clothes represented.”
Fashion historian Jade Halbert says it’s impossible to underestimate the importance of Mary Quant. Not for her design talent – she thinks Biba was stronger – but for revolutionising the industry and putting women front and centre.
She said: “Every female fashion business since owes something to Mary Quant.”
For the first time ever, a woman’s name was on a hugely successful international business.
Mary had two business partners – husband Alexander Plunkett-Greene and money man Archie McNair – but they stayed in the background.
She was the name, face and personality of the
business. Jade said: “Other fashion brands followed.
“Laura Ashley was a husband-and-wife team but it wasn’t called Bernard Ashley. Biba was run by a couple, so was Jean Muir.”
But after the success of the Mary Quant brand, the men’s names were nowhere to be seen.
Plunkett-Greene and McNair were, according to Jade, key to Mary’s success. She said: “She had excellent behind-the-scenes support.
“Her husband was a bohemian aristocrat. Archie McNair had great business acumen. As a trio they were forward thinking. They were a perfect mixture.”
The three of them opened a boutique, Bazaar, in London’s King’s Road.
Unable to source the groovy merchandise she wanted to sell to young women like herself, Mary started making it. She had only just graduated from art school but went back to college to learn pattern cutting.
Tilbury said: “Mary had wonderful legs and wore her own skirts very short. Customers would say, ‘I want this hemline raised, make it shorter, shorter.’”
Jade points out that Bazaar was not the only boutique catering to the young and daring. Carnaby Street was lined with shops for stylish boys and girls with money to spend. Mary’s masterstroke was to turn the youthquake into an international business.
She said: “Mary Quant was not the first person to make clothes that were not like the ones your mother wore. But she was the first person to take fashion for young people seriously.” London was ideally set up for fashion manufacturing, with factories that could assemble clothes, make buttons and trims, dye fabrics and hold a newcomer’s hand.
A Mary Quant minidress was a big ticket item, costing the equivalent of a month’s wages for a secretary. But when she entered the mass market via licensing deals, a whole generation could afford to buy into fashion.
By creating licensed products, Mary democratised her designs. Can’t afford a dress? There were tights and lipsticks at pocket money prices.
This business model is the basis of many of the biggest brands in fashion today. Chanel makes far more from lipsticks and perfume than it does from clothes.
Licensing also took Mary’s message beyond the capital, with her mustard, plum and teal accessories arriving in department stores across the country. Jade said: “No one in the provinces had seen anything like it.”
Mary was the poster girl for carefree 60s femininity.
With her sharp haircut and model legs, she was a walking advert for her own brand.
Scottish 60s designer Marion Donaldson told Jade that when she was growing up, she didn’t know what a fashion designer did. Then she saw Mary Quant.
Jade said: “Who would have taken Marion Donaldson seriously if they had not seen the global success of Mary ∙Mary Quant?”
Quant opens at the V&A Dundee on August 27.
Mary had wonderful legs and wore her own skirts HeaTHer MARY TILbUrY QUANT’S PR