Dame Mary Quant death: Brit fashion icon dies ‘peacefully at home’ aged 93

Dame Mary Quant – the British queen of Swinging Sixties fashion who introduced miniskirts and hot pants to the world – passed away today at the age of 93.

The south-east London designer famously declared that she “didn’t have time to wait for the women’s liberal,” so began a fashion revolution to rescue young women of the 1950s and 1960s from being forced to dress for another generation.

Dame Mary raised hemlines to daring heights, pioneered sack dresses and turned women’s pants and tights into wardrobe staples, and popularized the bob haircut pioneered by her great friend Vidal Sassoon.

Sleeveless shift dresses, skinny ribbed sweaters, colored tights and jumpsuits were also among Dame Mary’s revolutionary designs.

And it was Bazaar, Quant’s small shop in the heart of bohemian King’s Road, that became the heart of London’s ‘Swinging Chelsea’ and the foundation for what would become an international fashion empire.

A statement from her family said she ‘passed away peacefully this morning at home in Surrey, UK’. It continued: ‘Dame Mary, aged 93, was one of the most internationally recognized fashion designers of the 20th century and an outstanding innovator of the Swinging Sixties.’

Her “Chelsea look,” with short skirts at its core, went mainstream, thanks in part to Quant’s collaboration with Twiggy, Britain’s first supermodel.

In tribute, Alexandra Shulman, former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, said today: “She was one of the truly influential figures in fashion and shaped the way women thought about themselves.

‘Her influence on both fashion and women’s emancipation cannot be underestimated. Her sleek, simple designs were a far cry from the kind of shapes and costumes women wore in the 1950s.

‘In addition to short skirts, she preferred pumps with low heels to high heels and her clothing invites you to behave differently after the formality of the past.

‘Her clothing reflects the social changes of the 1960s, when young women took the pill and started working more.

“She was also one of the first designers to realize she could roll out a make-up brand.”

Dame Mary’s streamlined, streamlined and vibrant designs transformed women’s clothing and defined the look of London in the 1960s. And her designs borrowed from menswear, blurring gender lines.

The debate still rages whether Quant or the French couturier André Courrèges was the inventor of the miniskirt. Anyway, extremely short skirts and shift dresses became Quant’s trademark.

She built a small boutique into a global fashion label and used mass production to make fashion available to an entire generation of women.

The Blackheath-born fashionista, the daughter of Welsh teachers, began designing in the 1950s and her signature style began to flourish in an era of increased freedom with the birth of Swinging London. Her early boutique, Bazaar, sold out of the early dresses made in a room.

Her work broke down barriers at a time of great change in Britain, featuring short skirts, PVC raincoats, decorative underwear and male sartorial examples of Dame Mary’s innovations.

Before Quant, teenage girls were expected to dress like their mothers, in tweedy skirts and twinsets with pearls.

Inspired by the streamlined designs of Coco Chanel and the flappers of the 1920s, Quant paired short tunic dresses with ocher, plum, ginger and grape tights, creating a high-fashion take on outfits she’d worn as a child.

There was a revolution going on in music, film, food and theatre, but it was Mary, a self-taught designer, who defined the look.

With her husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, she opened two boutiques – the first, Bazaar, on the ground floor of their Chelsea home. The day’s sales paid for the fabric that was made up overnight into new stock for the next day.

Frequented by the Chelsea Set, it offered a radically different shopping experience. Loud music, free drinks and bold window displays created a ‘scene’ that often went on late into the night.

So that ordinary working women could afford her clothes, Quant created the lower-cost diffusion line, Ginger Group, in 1963, which was sold in department stores across the country. As many as seven million women had at least one of her designs in their wardrobes, and more still wore her range of cosmetics.

She was a powerful role model and her influence extended beyond fashion. “I didn’t have time to wait for women to be released,” she famously declared.

Earlier this year, Dame Mary was named a Companion of Honor – a prestigious honor bestowed upon those who have made long-standing contributions to the arts, sciences, medicine or government – on King Charles III’s First Honor Roll.

She became a lady on the 2015 New Year’s Honors list, again for services to fashion, saying at the time that it was ‘the girls on King’s Road who invented the mini’. I wore them very short and the customers would say ‘shorter, shorter.’

Born and raised in Blackheath, London, South East London, Dame Mary’s parents, both Welsh school teachers, refused to let her take a fashion course, so instead she studied illustration at Goldsmiths.

There she met her future husband and business partner, the aristocrat Alexander Plunket Greene. After graduating in 1953 with a degree in arts education, she began an apprenticeship with a high-end milliner.

Two years later she opened her famous boutique, Bazaar, on King’s Road in Chelsea – and frustrated with the clothes available at the wholesale market, the self-taught designer soon filled it with her own creations.

Drawing on a range of influences, including musicians and the Mods, she created what she called “relaxed yet bold clothes that match the actions of normal life.” Most famous were her garments, which included short tunic dresses and tights in bright colours.

Her designs proved a hit and a second Bazaar opened on King’s Road in 1957, with short skirts and shift dresses becoming her trademark. In addition to the min skirt – which became an international trend with the help of model Twiggy – Dame Mary also created the “skinny rib” sweater and is credited with inventing hot pants in 1966.

Her business expanded into the British mass market with a new, lower-cost line, Ginger Group, in 1963.

She was awarded an OBE in 1966, opened a third store on London’s New Bond Street in 1967, and by the end of the decade, an estimated seven million women had at least one of her products in their wardrobe, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Dame Mary, who once said that ‘fashion is a means of competing in life outside the home’, later produced high quality women’s clothing from the late 1970s.

She married Alexander Plunket Greene in 1957. He died in 1990. They had a son.