Mary Quant, the inventor of the miniskirt, dies

British designer Mary Quant, best known for being the “mother of the miniskirt”, has died at the age of 93. In a statement released by her family, we read that she passed away peacefully this morning at her home in Surrey. Thanks to Quant, in the second half of the 1900s, women’s clothing spread all over the world.

The family has called her “one of the most internationally recognized fashion designers of the 20th century and an outstanding innovator of the Swinging Sixties”. Barbara Mary Quant was born in Blackheath, on February 11, 1934, in a suburb of London. Her parents are two Welsh professors who teach at London University. For their beloved daughter they dream of a peaceful future as a teacher. Instead for her Mary, who studies at Goldsmiths College, that life is unbearable, she and her sixteen years she decides to leave home to live in London. Here she meets Alexander Plunket Greene, scion of a noble English family and nephew of Bertrand Russell, who is also eager for freedom. The two begin a bohemian life: they eat when they have money, they travel as they can, they dress as they wish. Mary has a fondness for short skirts and ankle boots, Alexander suits.
The two make friends with a former lawyer turned photographer, Archie McNair, and when Alexander inherits money for his 21st birthday, they decide, with McNair’s help, to buy a house. In the basement they open a restaurant and on the first floor the Bazaar boutique (1955). The boutique located on London’s Kings Road is an instant hit with young Britons, and beyond the borders. Finally, the young people of the breaking generation have found someone who thinks like them, who lives like them and who understands what they might like. The young people of the most conformist country in Europe, Great Britain, are the first to feel the need for changes which, in order to break with tradition and gain attention, must necessarily be extreme.
The break with the old world is represented by long hair for boys, short skirts for girls and the music of the Beatles. At first, Londoners laugh at Mary’s boutique and at the folkloric group of young people who frequent it, but then curiosity attracts people from the world of cinema, theater and art. The money arrives and Mary, who has meanwhile married Alexander, opens another shop on posh Brompton Road in Knightsbridge. An icon of Swinging London she will also be a brilliant entrepreneur: she founded the “Ginger Group” in 1963 to export her products to the USA, she will launch a line of cosmetics in 1966 and a footwear collection in 1967. In 1966, Mary Quant receives from the hands of the queen Elizabeth, the honor of Knight of the British Crown, which the year before had been given to his idols: the Beatles. The writer Bernard Levin will define it “High Priestess of Sixties fashion”, the high priestess of the fashion of the sixties.