Remembering the Revolutionary Mary Quant

As in so many of the origin-stories of great women designers, Quant had resorted to sewing up the sort of clothes she wanted to wear when she couldn’t find anything she liked herself. Bazaar was set up with her husband Alexander Plunkett-Greene and an espresso-bar entrepreneur Archie McNair, and at first, she was so scared of customers that she kept a bottle of Scotch under the counter.

She made A-line pinafores and popped turtlenecks under them, and came up with jazzy jersey colors in minimal shapes that jived with pop art. “The shop was constantly stripped bare,” she wrote. “You will find duchesses jostling with typists for the same dress.” They were clothes made for the flat-chested, narrow body-types of young people—a total revolt against the hourglass femininity that had dominated popular fashion since Dior’s New Look of 1947. When that kind of change occurs, it’s irresistible.

But the true genius of Mary Quant was that she was always far more than a fashion designer. Born in Blackheath, London in 1930, she was a war-time child whose Welsh parents valued education. Nevertheless, she had to fight them to study illustration and design at Goldsmiths college. There, at 16, she met Plunkett-Green, an older bohemian upper-class eccentric running around the jazz clubs of London. While he handled the business, her pioneering genius was for what we now call merchandising, brand extension, and fashion communication. Eventually she designed an entire lifestyle universe, stamped with her brilliantly simple daisy-logo graphic.

It began with Quant’s drive to make her clothes part of a total look. For help, she went to her hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, another young London upstart who was aiming to revolutionize his trade. In his 1968 memoir I’m Sorry I Kept You Waiting Madam, he tells how Quant came to him with a problem about the show she was about to put on. “Vidal, I’m sick to death of all the chignons we’ve been using.” Sassoon jumped at it, telling her, “I’m going to cut hair like you cut material.” Quant sat down. Sassoon chopped off her hair into a precise five-point geometric bob in order to persuade her models to follow suit. It caused a sensation. “Grace Coddington was the first model to appear. As she danced before them, her hair danced with the clothes,” Sassoon remembered.