SMART THINKING
A major retrospective of designer Mary Quant reveals how she made fashion accessible for women.
A major retrospective of designer Mary Quant reveals how she made fashion accessible for women.
Start making plans to travel to Bendigo, NSW this coming March and visit the Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery from 20 March, 2021.
This major retrospective on the international fashion designer Dame Mary Quant – the queen of the miniskirt, colourful tights and tailored trousers, who personified the energy and fun of the swinging ’60s and was a powerful role model for working women by encouraging a new age of feminism – comes direct from a sell-out season at London’s revered Victoria & Albert Museum, and explores the years between 1955 and 1975.
Always challenging conventions, Quant inspired young women to rebel against the traditional dress of their mothers and grandmothers, turning her tiny London boutique into a wholesale global brand, making fashion less exclusive and more accessible to a new generation. Drawn from Mary Quant’s own archive as well as the V&A’s extensive fashion holdings, which include the largest public collection of Quant garments in the world, the exhibition brings together over 110 garments as well as accessories, cosmetics, sketches and photographs. Many of the star objects featured in the exhibition come directly from a public call-out by the V&A to find rare garments and collect personal stories from the real women who wore Quant fashions.
Bendigo Art Gallery director Jessica Bridgfoot says she is delighted to present this exhibition in Bendigo. “Mary Quant was an icon whose fashion business emerged as a response to gloomy post-war Britain – and it comes to us at a time when we could all also use a lift.” The exhibition begins when Quant first opened her experimental shop, Bazaar, on Chelsea’s King’s Road in 1955, a period during which her designs, often based on schoolgirl pinafores or masculine tailoring, brought an entertaining new slant to fashion.