DAME MARY QUANT - 11TH FEBRUARY 1930 – 13TH APRIL 2023

London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur of op and pop. The city is alive with birds (girls) and beatles, buzzing with minicars and telly stars, pulsing with half a dozen separate veins of excitement.

Those were the famous words of the 1966 Time magazine article Great Britain: You Can Walk Across It On the Grass, and the late Dame Mary Quant was instrumental in creating this vision.

As Quant later said, her modus operandi was “to not wait for couturiers to imitate what rich people wore in Paris”. Instead, she made fashion accessible, and at the end of the 1960s, 7 million women were estimated to have bought her clothes. Quant famously named her miniskirt design after her own Cooper, and she contended that the demand came from her customers.

Barbara Mary Quant was born in 1930, graduated from Goldsmiths in 1953 and established her first shop, Bazaar of Chelsea, in October 1955. Five years later, the US retailer J Penney invited her to devise a collection, and their 1962 showcase created a near riot. Quant recalled, in place of:

middle-aged women in corsets and frozen beehives, three thousand people turned up for our wild fashion shows, with models dancing, a pop group playing and the police and fire brigade arriving in a blind panic.

And in the UK, the image of her creations coalesced with the Mini. As a result, the public came to regard both as keystones of ‘Swinging London’. Just a few years earlier, Alec Issigonis famously envisioned his design as the car for the district nurse. By the early 1960s, the ‘smart set’ adopted it as urban transport - debutants, Peter Sellers and HRH Princess Margaret. The Morris Cooper used by Julie Christie in 1962’s The Fast Lady perfectly reflects this image.

But by the mid-1960s, the Mini was widely regarded as the epitome of urban chic for the young driver – automotive fashion that was as economically accessible as Quant’s designs. In 1967 she stated: “Once, only the rich set the fashion. Now it was the inexpensive little dress seen on the girl in the high street. Thus, it was with an inexpensive little car”. Twenty-one years later, the Rover Group paid tribute with ‘Mini Designer by Mary Quant’, with an eye-catching interior, a choice of black or white paint finishes, ‘Nimbus Grey’ fittings and special badging.

Of course, comparatively few Britons directly experienced the ‘Swinging London’ Carnaby Street world. There is considerable photographic evidence to suggest that in many parts of the UK, ‘the 1960s’ did not commence until 1970. But Mary Quant’s vision allowed people to aspire to this thrilling new world. Just as customizing a Morris Mini Super need not cost too much £sd, the ‘London Look’ could be worn in the Southampton Rank Mecca dancehall or Broad Street in Reading. The era when “you went to Paris to the couture houses, or you tore pictures out of magazines and tried to find a dressmaker” had already passed.

Perhaps the encapsulation of Dame Mary Quant’s philosophy was “The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone”. Similarly, those original Morris Mini-Minors and Austin Sevens made the epitome of automotive style within reach of thousands of motorists. Both still look contemporary because they were not “of their time” – they created their time: