The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Hail fashion icon Mary
V&A Dundee is reopening in style with a Quant retrospective that captures the spirit of the Swinging Sixties and much more, writes Gayle Ritchie
The most iconic designer of the 1960s, Mary Quant rocked the world with her miniskirt revolution and made women’s clothes fun, irreverent and affordable.
Her bright, exuberant fashion catered to young women’s sense of freedom and inspired them to rebel against the traditional, stuffy outfits worn by their mothers and grandmothers.
Fashion lovers looking forward to exploring Quant’s legacy were disappointed when V&A Dundee’s retrospective on the designer, due to launch in April, was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
But as it gears up to open on Thursday, in tandem with the reopening of the museum, excitement levels are hotting up.
First shown at sister museum V&A South Kensington in London, the exhibition features many of Quant’s most iconic designs, including wet-look PVC macs, bright jersey shifts, groovy A-line dresses, schoolgirlish pinafores, micro-miniskirts – including one made from jute – matching knickers, and vibrant, daisy-logoed makeup.
It also showcases designs which playfully subverted menswear – at a time when women were banned from wearing trousers in formal settings such as restaurants.
Step inside the vast exhibition space on the banks of the Tay and your senses will immediately be assailed by the treasure house’s transformation. Think bold, bright colours, wild patterns, compelling film footage and jazz music, favoured by Quant.
Pinks, reds and yellows are in abundance, as are wacky geometric designs, polka dots and risqué fabrics.
The exhibition is at once fun, flirty, arrogant, aggressive, sexy and playful
– a bit like Quant herself, back in the Swinging Sixties.
The sheer flamboyance of it all is sure to reignite the memories of Quant fans who saved up to buy the trailblazing designer’s products.
“The exhibition aims to capture the feel of 1950 and 1960s London,” says Kirsty Hassard, curator at V&A Dundee.
“As people walk through, they’ll get a strong sense of what it was like to go shopping in Quant’s Bazaar boutique in Chelsea.
“They’ll also find themselves transported back in time to her fashion shows.”
The Quant exhibition is the first international retrospective on the fashion designer, born in 1930 in Blackheath, London, and the first major fashion exhibition at V&A Dundee.
It explores the period from 1955-75, the two decades in which her influence was at its peak.
“It demonstrates how even to this day, Quant influences how we shop and dress,” says Kirsty.
“Visitors will see many examples of her fashions, from dresses to cosmetics, underwear and dolls.”
Archive footage, including films and interviews with Quant and her contemporaries, is another highlight.
Quant was one of the first designers to make fashion accessible to a wider audience
The exhibition is split into two parts with the first introducing 1950s Chelsea and the beginnings of Quant’s first boutique, Bazaar, which opened on the King’s Road in 1955.
The iconic Mary Quant look – short skirt, flat shoes, tights and cropped Vidal Sassoon haircut – was created in her own image and the exhibition explores how this found a ready market among young people in London, using case studies of women who bought Quant for social occasions.
Quant’s models were showcased in extravagant and provocative window displays overlooking the King’s Road, which became a mini-skirt catwalk and drew photographers from across the globe.
“City gents in bowler hats beat on our shop window with their umbrellas shouting ‘immoral!’ and ‘disgusting!’ at the sight of our mini-skirts over the tights, but customers poured in to buy,” Quant recalled in 1966.
“The mini-skirt was a symbol of the growing confidence of the young of that time as they broke away from the rules and inhibitions of the post-war period.”
Almost overnight Quant, who had always been obsessed with clothes, cutting up bedspreads to make dresses as a child, became a fashion sensation although, of course, she had been working away behind the scenes for years.
With utopian ideals of free love and liberation in full force, and women keen to forget the dreary years of rationing and prim and proper dressing, it seemed Quant had tapped into a zeitgeist moment.
Her sassy and sexy designs were a way for women to express their independence; she famously liked shorter hemlines because it made it easier to run for the bus, or head straight from work to dance at a club.
Hers weren’t clothes made to restrict the wearer, but to give them more freedom and movement and she favoured a stretchy, wearable jersey material for many designs.
Quant was also ahead of the curve in terms of androgynous dressing and increasingly experimented with masculine tailoring.
“Some of the dresses in the exhibition come from the V&A’s #WeWantQuant social media campaign that asked people who owned original Quant designs to get in touch,” says Kirsty.
“So many people identified with her – they wanted to join her revolution – and bought her clothes, and it’s great to be able to showcase these now, in 2020.”
The exhibition also looks at how Quant’s garments were marketed in the US, and how her wholesale brand, Ginger Group, was stocked by boutiques and department stores across the UK and internationally.
The second part of the exhibition looks at the Quant company’s diversification into other products including paper patterns, shoes, underwear, makeup and dolls.
“Quant was one of the first designers to make fashion accessible to a wider audience, when fashionable clothing had been mainly haute couture – expensive and rather elitist,” says Kirsty.
“As a result, London replaced Paris as the centre of fashion in the 1960s.
“She designed clothes that made people feel good and we hope the