I DIDN’T JUST WANT TO LOOK LIKE HER. I WANTED TO BE HER
Marvellous Mary Quant, the fashion guru who changed the lives of so many women who grew up during the extraordinary years between 1960 and 1970, of whom I was one, has at last been recognised as a truly great and enduring designer with her own retrospective at the V&A.
She’s now in her 80s, Dame Mary Quant. At the pinnacle of her popularity, when not everyone, including my mother, thought she represented the height of fashion, there were some industry specialists who saw her importance. Ernestine Carter, an influential journalist, wrote: “It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior and Mary Quant.”
I was certainly born at the right time to follow her lead. In 1964, as Mary burst on to the scene in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and
Nova and filtered through from the King’s Road and Swinging London to a working class girl in Barnsley, I was all of 14 years old. I not so much wanted to look like Mary Quant, I wanted to be her and break away from what my mother thought suitable attire for a girl of my age.
Here’s what life was like for a teenager circa 1964. Twinset, pearls, skirt of “respectable” length, stockings, suspender belt, Playtex girdle though none was needed, stiff bra with “supportive” straps, court shoes with medium heel in which it was nigh on impossible to run, hair permed at home by my mother with a Twink solution. She achieved the perfect “mini me”.
Of course, a girl with no money was never going to persuade her mother to give her the wherewithal to take the train to London and go to Mary’s boutique, Bazaar, to achieve the look, but a decent hairdresser did her best with the Vidal Sassoon bob and Barnsley market produced the skirt, the tights and the make-up that would cause my mother to cry: “No daughter of mine is going out in that extended belt, dark tights, horrible black eye make-up and white lipstick. You look like a sick panda.” I wore it all anyway. It was freedom, it was revolution. There was some debate about whether or not she actually invented the mini skirt. Some said it was the French designer Courrèges, but when I interviewed Mary for Woman’s Hour in 2012, she told me what the inspiration had been. She’d seen a girl in a tap dance class wearing black with the shortest of skirts, black tights and white ankle socks.
But it was the girls on King’s Road, she told me, who invented the mini. She made them the length they wanted and often heard them say, “Shorter, shorter!”. The women who wore it were lively, positive and opinionated and enjoyed being noticed, but wittily.
Mary Quant’s influence on the way British women look and move is incalculable. She truly changed the lives of my generation by freeing us from the fashion constraints our mothers and grandmothers endured. I no longer wear a mini skirt, although I still have the one – I saved up pocket money to buy it in 1965. It no longer fits so I stick to Mary’s black leggings and a baggy top. I’m comfy as ever thanks to her and I enjoy seeing today’s young women benefiting from the freedoms she introduced.
So thank you, Mary, for bringing us tights in place of stockings and suspenders, no corsets, lightweight, comfy bras your husband named “Booby Traps”, and waterproof mascara dubbed “Jeepers Peepers”.
It’s instructive to recall male executives in the cosmetics industry who would ask why a woman would need waterproof mascara. Mary told them women sometimes cry and they swim; that streaks of mascara down a teary face is not a good look. She was essentially a woman’s woman and our freedom of movement, confidence and liberation would be poorer even now without her genius.
‘I like seeing today’s women benefiting from the freedoms she introduced’