The day Vidal Sassoon snipped my ear off
Scandalous miniskirts, outrageous celebrity parties, and a Royal fall-out. As the V&A launches a celebration of Mary Quant, Britain’s grooviest fashionista recalls those racy days – in her own stylish words
WITH their furled umbrellas and bowler hats, it was clear the men were City gents. But as they made their way along Chelsea’s King’s Road, it became apparent that the display in my shop window infuriated them far more than anything the markets might have done that day.
‘Immoral!’ shouted one, as he whacked the window with his umbrella. ‘Disgusting!’ My crime? I’d dressed the mannequins in my newly designed miniskirts and tights — and the City gents found them unspeakably vulgar.
They weren’t the only ones. As customers poured in to buy the new fashions, there were sour grapes from the Paris couture world, who clearly didn’t like so much attention going to a British designer.
So when the Press told Coco Chanel that I admired her beyond all others, she said: ‘From her, it is a very small compliment.’
Chanel had become grumpy in old age, but who can blame her? Old age aches.
Still, it’s quite understandable that the subtle sexiness of my designs made some people uneasy. The mini — which I’d started producing at roughly the same time as the designer Courreges was also shortening hemlines — was the most self-indulgent, optimistic, ‘look-atme, isn’t-life-wonderful’ fashion ever devised.
It was young, liberated, and exuberant. The mini says: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be a woman? We are bigger, better, brighter and stronger than before — and we love being female.’
BOTH my parents had Firsts from university, and my father became a lecturer and historian — so I saw myself as a duffer by comparison.
I was always obsessed by fashion. When asked in a school exam paper which side I’d take in the battle between the Roundheads and Cavaliers, I compared the underwear, dress fabrics, colours, accessories, hair styles, hats, make-up, toiletries and demeanour of the two factions.
Naturally, I came down strongly on the side of the Cavaliers, as they were more chic.
One of my earliest inspirations came from peering into a room where there was a tapdancing class being held. There, in the middle of the class, was a vision of chic.
She was an older girl than me — perhaps eight or nine — with bobbed hair, wearing a black skinny-rib sweater, seven inches of black pleated skirt and black tights under white ankle socks.
It was the white socks and short skirt that did it for me. The look was everything I loved. So I started cutting up bedspreads, trying to make the clothes I wanted to wear.
When I left school, I was naturally keen to go to fashion school, but my parents were dead against it. There’s no future in fashion, they said — and from their perspective, they were probably right.
In the early half of the 20th century, fashion was the preserve of the grand, not something for ordinary everyday women. It wasn’t seen as a very English thing to do, much the same as going abroad.
Middle and upper-class men had tailors, but women’s fashion was considered a frivolous extravagance. Quite grand young women would point out the charms of some delicious dress in French Vogue, and Mabel the ex-nanny would have a bash at making it, with some heavy fabric bought, reduced, in Jacqmar’s sale.
No wonder our fashion reputation was a joke. I’m lucky that I never went to fashion school. If I had, I’d have been taken to Paris to see the top couturiers’ collections and taught to adapt them for mass production, as that’s the way things were done. As a compromise, I was allowed to enroll at Goldsmiths Arts School, where you just collared a table and got on with whatever you wanted to do. And for me, that was designing clothes solely for myself and my friends.
Unlike the other students, we wore wide elastic belts at the waist with shorts or peg-top skirts, and slick little pin-tucked tops or tight neat sweaters. The look was finished off by knee-socks, or fishnet tights from theatrical suppliers. Back then, in the early Fifties, we must have seemed like creatures from another planet.
London was dead. The grownups were still hoping life would revert to how it had been before the war, and the prevailing attitude was: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’
The city was a bombsite, where the only thing that thrived was the buddleia. If you went out to tea you took your own private plate of (rationed) rancid butter and kept a sharp eye on it.
If you had a bath, there was a rota and you were allowed five inches of water. There was no heating and no hot water except from old-fashioned geysers that had a fetish for exploding. Fog permeated everything.
It was little wonder that young people were bored and frustrated: we had nowhere to go to keep warm except the cinema, and nothing to do. So we started to take control, particularly in art schools and colleges, which became the hotbed of new ideas.
Quite suddenly, the younger generation seemed to connect to an electric current of hope.
The new ethos was: if you want it, do it yourself. And what we wanted was art, theatre, film, design, fashion, food, sex — and most of all music and dance.
love with Paris. The food was better: life was better. In every bar and restaurant, the French thumped their elbows, raised their fists and argued politics long into the night.
But our future was in London. When we left art school, I got a job ironing veils in a hat shop — all hats had short eyeveils then — and went to pattern-cutting classes in the evenings. Alexander was working in Selfridges, selling gingham and strips of elastic for braces by the yard.
We’d talked many times about working together, so when he inherited £5,000 at the age of 21, he decided to start a business in Chelsea.
The King’s Road was very much a village then, a rather shabby and charming artists’ village, more like Paris than most districts of London. Locals went out in their dressing gowns and slippers in the morning to buy their bread from the baker’s.
Against this backdrop, we started a shop, called Bazaar, with a restaurant called Picture: REXSCANPIX Alexander’s below. Alexander designed the shopping bags. In fact, Bazaar was the first shop to have the lettering of its name almost the same size as the bag — which turned all our customers into walking billboards.
Working capital being rather short, I used his mother’s account at Harrods to keep me supplied with cloth. Apparently, it had the cheapest credit arrangements in London, and nobody got cross about you paying for things for at least a year.
We bought sewing machines and I started to make the women’s clothes I wanted but which did not exist, such as tunic dresses and knickerbockers. I also made hipster pants for women because Alexander had his cut that way. And I cut skirts hipsterstyle, which made them shorter and sharp. Reaction was mixed. The new shorter length, combined with a mix of male suitings and very feminine blouses, provoked male excitement and sometimes loathing. But, incredibly, within ten days of opening in 1955, we had hardly a piece of original merchandise left. Soon we had four machinists, and I’d have to dash back to Harrods most days for more cloth. When I walked to the shop each morning, carrying the latest completed dresses, some customers were so keen they’d grab them from me. Many people came every week to see what we’d done with the window. By the early Sixties, the King’s Road had become a veritable catwalk for the miniskirt, with American Press photographers on both sides of the street attempting to capture Swinging London.
Most of the staff were very young debutantes. Debs ran Chelsea life in those days, and they adored our shop and everything in it. Bazaar became a friendly meeting place for actors, musicians, photographers, models and film directors — an outrageous day- andnight party that we gaily encouraged while privately worrying whether we could afford it. When it became clear that we could, our success left us as stunned as everyone else. We couldn’t quite believe it, or cope. Our banking, for instance, was done when the till drawer wouldn’t shut any more.
Alexander’s, meanwhile, became the most fashionable restaurant in Chelsea, with an amazingly international clientele.
I remember Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier sitting with two friends on table number one. They were flirting monstrously and laying into tagliatelli, which sat in a large basin between them.
Alexander and I got married in 1957. He was a hell of a womaniser, and that makes life bumpy.
But I was working so hard, and so obsessed with design, that I knew it was partly my fault. Women would phone me and say: ‘Can Alexander come out to play today?’ And I would find little presents for him left in the car. The trouble was that he was such fun to be with.
For us, he discovered the most perfect flat in Draycott Avenue, Chelsea, which had once been an enormous ballroom. This became my studio by day and a party venue by night.
Alexander had a raised platform made where we installed a handsome Swedish porcelain stove, with long bookcases on either side and two large, scarlet leather sofas facing each other.
Terry Donovan, the photographer, found us the most enormous refectory table from a nunnery in Wales and this became my workplace, littered with drawings and samples.
The only other furniture was a huge Spanish cupboard kept full of wine, a target for pistol practice and a bicycle, which was useful for racing around the ballroom.
Unfortunately, what with American Vogue, George Melly, Lulu, Dudley Moore, Michael Caine and various others dropping in, our flat turned into one of the most popular venues in Chelsea, thus making it more and more difficult for me to concentrate. One thing I longed to do was to design a complete look, from head to toe, so I started a make-up line in 1966.
Breaking rules is so revitalising. Instead of dowager saleswomen, we used pretty miniskirted girls and jeans-clad boys to show people how to use the new make-up. Then we shocked everyone by launching ‘Make-up for Men’.
Meanwhile, I was also designing clothes for 1,765 stores in the U.S. owned by JC Penney.
They trusted me completely — unlike in Britain, where some manufacturers thought I was too young to be taken seriously, no doubt because I wore miniskirts and over-the-knee socks.
Mind you, I had the same problem when I toured America with seven models to show off the designs: everyone thought I was under-age. As no one would serve me a drink, Alexander had to take along a travelling bar.
At the time, we all looked about 16, whereas young American women dressed to look like actress Barbara Stanwyck — or as frightening as possible. Our shows changed the whole way BeFORe fashion was presented.
we came along, clothes were modelled by paralysed-looking, middle-aged women in corsets and frozen ‘ beehive’ hairstyles, with male presenters intoning: ‘ Here comes Melissa in a pale blue dress with un-pressed pleats’ — as though you were blind.
Now, 3,000 people turned up for our wild shows. The models — all debs in minis — danced with bobbed hair flying as a pop group played. Hearing the racket, the police and fire brigade would usually arrive in a panic.
everyone knew the models’ hair had been cut by Vidal Sassoon. So, at the end of the shows, 50 to 60 girls would besiege our hotel, blocking the doors to our rooms and demanding Sassoon style haircuts.
Sorry, Vidal — the models and I did the best we could, cutting their hair there and then in the corridor.
I’d discovered Sassoon when I was dashing past the wrong end of Bond Street one day and saw a photograph of a haircut that stopped me in my tracks.
The salon was miles upstairs, reached by a tiny, rickety lift — but up there he ruled, cutting hair and performing, rather like a four-star chef.
One night, he was cutting my hair to promote his new five-point geometric bob, in the presence of various Press photographers.
Spurred on by the vast audience, he went whap! — and cut off my ear. Just the fat bit — and nothing bleeds more. Five-point,
asymmetric or spiky ‘ en brosse’ haircuts — I had them all.
they quite simply liberated women from hours of being parboiled under the bonnet of a hairdryer, with fat rollers skewered to their scalps.
soon, I was also helping to liberate women from pointy bras.
Indeed, somewhere, there exists a photograph of me, very small and miniskirted, lecturing some very charming large american men about the shape of breasts.
I remember, with some embarrassment, quoting the French novelist Colette to them: ‘Breasts are shaped like half a lemon — the interesting half. they are not tennis balls.’
the natural-shaped bras and other collections for JC Penney were so successful that I went on designing for them for many years. I stopped only when I became pregnant in 1970 with our son orlando. so WHat happened to the Quant empire? During the three-day week recession of the seventies, part of Mary Quant Cosmetics was sold to Max Factor, who rather neglected the brand.
then Revlon bought it, and that was the end of that.
at least the Japanese went on manufacturing the cosmetics — and they sell them to this day.
as for the clothes, well, I couldn’t continue designing up to 18 collections a year for ever.
In 1988, I was told by doctors that alexander wouldn’t live longer than two more years. the shock was appalling.
I sometimes had to beg him to breathe, as I pumped his chest and gave him oxygen. But, after two years, he petered out.
I can’t bear to write any more about alexander’s exit because I will never get over it.
after his death, two of his greatest old friends came at weekends to keep me company. then one of them — antony Rouse, once praised by lady antonia Fraser as ‘the most beautiful man at oxford’ — just gradually moved in. We’d flirted on and off for years, and he said we had unfinished business. I was so used to him being around that I could only be delighted.
When I look back on my life, I can’t help recalling a phrase that used to be said to my generation as children: ‘you wait until you’re grown up, when you have to face real life.’
this made me want to avoid ‘ real life’ and live a sort of fantasy life. In many ways, that’s exactly what happened. MARY QUANT at the V&A opens today.