Dame Mary Quant

 

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Of course, curmudgeons may scoff¹ at the idea that a clothes designer would make meaningful contributions to world culture. But with her new line of apparel, Dame Mary introduced a new concept that shocked! shocked! the world. And that was that young people should NOT be like their parents.

Just look at pictures from the first half of the 20th century of kids ready for a night out! The guys are decked out in suits and ties and the gals are gussied up their best evening dresses. But that's exactly the way their folks dressed when going out on the town!

This looking-like-Mom-and-Pop is what Mary could not abide. If the old wanted to dress like the young, well and good. But the young should NEVER dress like the old.

Of course, such a revolutionary concept required revolutionary vestments. So in 1956, Mary opened a shop in Chelsea and began designing the Mod look.

In the early days it wasn't quite clear what made the Mods so modern. After all, the Mod Men would still wear coats and ties (and trousers, of course), and the Mod Marchesas would put on their fancy dresses. What was the difference between the kids and their folks?

Well, from a a casual glance it was manifest that the Mods weren't sporting "old folks" clothes and the styles had adopted a definite Continental look. The girls' hemlines were daringly in parity with the knees, and the fellows favored high heeled Chelsea shoes.

Particularly at odds with convention was the hairstyles. Girls' hair went short and they favored the bobs. The guys adopted a longish dry look with the hair brushed back or casually combed to one side.Lifestyles became more mobile. To get to the nightclubs and dancing parties, young people needed to get around quick and not have to stand around waiting for the bus or the tube. So individual transport became a necessity. But automobiles were still a prohibitive rarity and to get around town the Mods turned to the relatively inexpensive motorized scooters from Italy, particularly Lambrettas and Vespas.

By 1960 Mary and her husband Alex Greene had already attracted a lot of attention in England when they decided to take their fashions across the ocean to the Colonies. But the American press seemed a bit condescending and referred to the clothes as "kooky". And that's when the reporters were being polite.

And look at the prices! Cor blimey! One of Mary's fancy beret hats was a costly $4! A long sleeved blouse ran for an exorbitant $9! And a full "knee skimming" sleeveless dress sold for a extortionate $20!

So just who would Mary contact to actually sell such outrageously priced apparel? Christine Dior? Givenchy? Schiaparelli?

Nope. When Mary came to the Good Old USA her major outlet was:

J. C. PENNY

Ha?² Do you mean Mary Quant's "Mod" fashions were sold by:

J. C. PENNY

Indeed.³ Mary Quant's early sales in America were through:

J. C. PENNY

That Mary was marketing her styles to America's Joe and Josephine Blow wasn't really surprising. After all, the Mod kids in England were largely working class. But after the first half of the Fifties, jobs became plentiful and some of the kids were making more than their parents. So they could easily set aside a pound or two a week on new clothes. If the prices seemed a bit steep in the US, it's likely there was a bit of a mark-up since - as the British soldiers discovered in World War II - the Yanks tended to a bit more flush than their post-War Albion cousins.

We mentioned a description of Mary's early dresses were described as knee-skimming. That was just the start and within a few short years, she was the leading advocate of the

MINI-SKIRT

.... which was a style that missed skimming the knee by four to six inches. By the mid-60's the "mini" had become de rigueur for fashionable young ladies.

But even though it's often stated Mary invented the mini-skirt, this is really an undecidable proposition since fashions are as much a product of transformation as they are of innovation. Short skirts have been around literally for millennia although they admittedly were not the Modern Mod Mini.

As early as the 1920's the "flappers" began wearing short skirts - at least they were short compared to what their Gibson Girl moms had been wrapping themselves in. Although the early flappers had their hemlines a few inches below the knee, after the mid-1920's the borders had arisen to actually allow visual inspection of their patellae pulchrae.

Going back a bit, we find the Greeks and Romans - men and women - were wearing tunicae which were loose tubes of cloth with holes for the head and arms which was belted at the waist. The result was a one-piece dress which generally reached no further down than the knees.

But certain employment demanded true tunicae minimae. Probably one profession that mandated the laciniae to be well above the knee was the fullō, that is, a fuller, a person who does the laundry. The job involved taking the clothes - including the togas - and treading on them in a vat of, well, we'll say it was a vat of a natural substance that contains a chemical known to be an excellent degreaser and cleaning agent. The shop owners placed large jars outside the doors so that the pedestrians - at least the men - could supply the raw materials while taking a welcome break.⁴

But the prototypes of the mini-skirt came even earlier - much earlier. A bronze age burial of a young woman was discovered in Denmark in 1921 and based on tree ring chronology archaeologists deduce she died about 1370 BC. Known as the Egtved Girl, she wore a skirt with the hemline at least 4 inches above the knee. Whether this was her day-to-day attire or if it was some special costume remains a matter of scholarly debate. But it's clear that over three millennia past the earliest Continental ladies were wearing garb remarkably similar to those from 1965.

Mary concentrated on outfitting the ladies but the fellows needed clothes, too. When a former record store owner became the manager for a rock and roll band made up of four scruffy lads from Liverpool, he insisted they drop their James Dean/Marlon Brando black leather jackets and blue jeans for Mod outfits. Although the lads grumbled they realized that appearing to be "good" kids would enhance their marketability and their fees.

Credit for the Fab Four's specific and moddish cut is given to London designer and tailor Arnold "Dougie" Millings with influence from Paris designer Pierre Cardin. Dougie was no newcomer to adorning popular singers. He had designed the outfits for the British megastar Cliff Richard as well as Marty Wilde who starred in and sang the catchy opening song for the The Helions, the Western with the South African setting. Dougie also designed matching suits for American pop artists like the Four Tops, the Temptations, and even Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

But as a Nobel Prize winner once said, the times were a-changin'. The heyday of the mods was soon over and as the Sixties quit swinging, the flower power motifs of the Synthetic Seventies began pushing the mods out. Midis began replacing mini's, and the carefully styled coiffures and the ties, trim jackets, and Chelsea boots vanished to be replaced by the long and shaggy look attenuated by sandals and dashikis. The hippies were in.

The hippies were in.

By then the world had indeed turned upside down. The kids, not their parents, determined how the families spent their time. Forget about going to movies which featured tough talking private eye's who take cases for sultry eyed broads. Instead everyone began going to movies about Galaxies A Long Time Ago and Far Far Away. Superheroes returned to the screen and movies based on long-vanished television series about where No One Had Gone Before led to never ending and plot recycling "franchises".

Kids even called the shots on what to do on vacation, for heaven's sake! Families no longer went to visit Grandma and Grandpa. Instead, they hied off to amusement parks where employees dressed up as anthropomorphic animals who lived in magic kingdoms. But we must remember that none of this stuff was really Mary's fault.

References and Further Reading

"Mary Quant: How Her 1960's Space-age Fashions Changed What We Wear", Dominic Lutyens, BBC, April 13, 2023.

"Bargains from Britain", LIFE, October 12, 1962, pp. 123-124, p. 127.

"A British Couples Kooky Styles", LIFE, December 5, 1960, p. 105, pp. 107-108.

"British - And Dizzier Than Ever", LIFE, September 17, 1965, p. 65-66.

"How Nightclub Design Evolved", Dominic Lutyens, BBC, May 24, 2018.

"1960s Fashion Designers to Look For", Ashley Kane, Live About, October 30, 2017.

"1960-1969", Karina Reddy, Fashion History Timeline, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, July 23, 2019.

"Introduction to 20th-Century Fashion", Albert and Victoria Museum.

Working IX to V: Orgy Planners, Funeral Clowns, and Other Prized Professions of the Ancient World, Vicki, León, Walker Books, 2007.

"The Egtved Girl", Danish National Museum.

"The Iconic Fashion of The Beatles", National Museums Liverpool.