Dame Mary Quant obituary
The fashion designer Mary Quant had perfected key aspects of 1960s British pop culture long before midnight chimed on the last day of 1959. The Chelsea girl and her try-anything attitude, her short, narrow garments casually bought from a Kings Road boutique – Quant had been working on these since the mid-50s. It took the zeitgeist until at least 1963 to catch on, let alone catch up.
Quant, who has died aged 93, opened her first Kings Road shop, Bazaar, in 1955, the year after Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel ended her postwar hiatus and reopened her Paris salon. They shared a similar ambition: to clothe young, independent women unsuited to fashion dominated by Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look and the work of the grand couturiers. Quant and Chanel designed their clothes to allow new physical and mental freedoms; Quant (unlike Chanel) was also in favour of fun, in reaction to her own teen years under postwar austerity.
Life then had been rationed, begrudged; almost the only place where the young could create their own excitement was at art college, with the Chelsea Arts Ball an annual chance for frivolity. At that ball a teenaged Quant, clad chiefly in balloons, hooked up with a fellow Goldsmiths’ College student, Alexander Plunket Greene, who swanned around long-haired in his mother’s silk pyjama top, trumpet in one hand and film script in the other.
“Life … began for me when I first saw Plunket,” she wrote in her 1966 autobiography, Quant By Quant. He was short on ready cash, with an income of “four bob a day,” he recalled, “if one bought cigarettes one couldn’t go the cinema too”, but posh and sexually sophisticated. “Alexander had no use for straightforward sex at all,” Quant said, and he also was consistently unfaithful.
He came
Read more on theguardian.com
