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MARY QUANT Hello. I'm Mary Quant. I'm a fashion designer. I designed the miniskirt, that caused so much havoc in the Sixties - the miniskirt that was such fun, but has travelled well to today. I still design clothes, and the miniskirt is part of that. Out of the miniskirt also came a complete look, which needed make-up of a new sort: make-up based on colour. So today we have colour shops, with make-up and with tops and bottoms and the pieces that go together, that make the whole. I grew up wanting to design clothes. The whole thing hit me at a very early age. In fact, I'm still in disgrace for cutting up a bedspread when I was ill with measles, aged something like six or seven. I think it started for me in that I inherited my clothes, as a child, from a cousin. And I must have been a very self-conscious child. Because I thought they weren't me. And I kind of knew the look that I wanted. I was absolutely riveted with this. So at art school I met Alexander Pinter-Green, later my husband, and we talked together about what we wanted to do. And we decided we wanted to work at this together. And with our third friend, who had started one of the first coffee-bars in London - an absolute revolution at the time - we started a shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, to be called "Bazaar". Underneath, we had a restaurant called "Alexander's". And there we opened the shop - to the most resounding and terrifying success. People argued, people banged on the doors, people crowded. We couldn't keep up with the sales. It was such an incredible success. It was a frightening success. The look I wanted was fundamentallly the tap-dancer. It was a look that you could move in, dance in and be alive in. A very short skirt, worn with tights. I had to persuade theatrical manufacturers to make the tights. And the dresses were very often tunic dresses, which went over skinny-rib sweaters. The tunic dresses were very, very short, and they were usually made of rather masculine fabrics. I liked masculine fabrics: Prince of Wales checks; city pinstripes; and flannels - worn with black tights, flattish shoes. The look was very much a head-to-toe look. It was very simple pieces. But when put together, it was a very powerful, strong look. And it just burst, I suppose. Energy and exuberance, really. The miniskirt caused an extraordinarily powerful reaction. There were the people who hated it. There were the bowler-hatted gentlemen beating on the shop window with their umbrellas. At the same time, there were these glamorous young men from the Royal Court, simply raging with pleasure about the whole thing and telling their girlfriends why they must buy these clothes and wear these things. So it had a very powerful, potent effect. I think what had happened really was that after the War there was an enormous vacuum. I think the generation that had actually been involved in the War came back exhausted and very depressed, and waited and waited for life to return to the way it had been before the War. But we, not knowing what life before the War was like, and knowing damn well what we wanted, just moved in and got at it ourselves. And so you got this bursting energy. And looking at the clothes now, it's very easy to see that they suggest a kind of wild "Look at me - isn't life wonderful!" And indeed it was. I can't remember it, of course, because I was there. (Laughs). But it was. (Laughs). E N D
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