The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Capturing energy of 1950s and 60s
LIFE was a whizz!” begins the autobiography of Mary Quant, the hugely influential designer of 1960s style. “It was such fun and unexpectedly wonderful despite, or perhaps because of its intensity. We were so fortunate with our enormous luck and timing; we partied too – there were no real boundaries.”
The “whizz” was the ethos that imbued Quant’s clothes, the ever-somini skirts for which she takes joint credit for inventing alongside the French designer, Andre Courreges; the subverting of the masculine suit for women when women were still banned from wearing trousers in restaurants.
Quant’s clothes were bright, fun, and redefined youth, casting aside the tailored tweed, pearls and cardigans which, in the 1950s, were the uniform which women, young and old, were cast in. For Quant those clothes were far too restrictive, physically and socially. Her idea was that women should still be able to move like children, to run – shock! – and with her partner Alexander Plunket Greene, the man she met at Goldsmiths College, she set up the business that would popoularise the “London Look” all over the world.
Her inventive clothes, from the “Wet Collection” of PVC macs, to the brightly coloured jersey mini-dresses, are just some of the key looks in the V&A Dundee’s delayed blockbuster, charting Quant during the glory years of 19551975.
The V&A Dundee, after opening with much pomp two years ago, seemed barely open before having to shut, like everything else, in March. Last week, it reopened with, one imagines, almost as much work involved in presenting the space as the first time round. Masks are mandatory, hand sanitiser all round, and the highest of ceilings to instill some sense of safety, with the restaurant repositioned and a one way system in operation.
The Mary Quant exhibition is a panacea to grey days, for you can’t fail to be wowed by the sheer joy and chutzpah of the brightly coloured dresses – and the odd trouser or two – on display upstairs in this Scottish showing of the V&As retrospective, curated by Stephanie Wood and Jenny
Lister, which first opened its doors in South Kensington last year, full of loaned and donated dresses from those who’d worn them in the 1960s and 70s. The feel of the clothes is as infectious as my mother-in-law tells me it was the first time round, the dresses – at least the 1960s minis, the colour-blocking, the playfulness of everything – thoroughly standing the test of time.
It was all about the London style, models zipping along the Thames in amphibious vehicles, dipping their feet in the water, leaping off statues, looking pop-eyed at policemen, and definitely not posing in the stylised and elegant way of models of the 1950s.
If London was the stomping ground of Mary Quant, this exhibition focuses on the glory years, as she set up her boutique, Bazaar, on the Kings Road (1955) and mini-skirted and blockcoloured her way through the 1960s to the more floral and flowing outlines of the 1970s.
Quant herself, not just the models,