Mary Quant & Mini Skirts

Random Reminiscences from Teenage Years by 60s Pop Star, Dottie Pickles.

Dottie Pickles, in her 60s Top of the Pops days.

Mary Quant had her hair styled by the equally famous, Vidal Sassoon.

At a time when clothes were classic tweed suits, tailored to pinch the waist and finished off with hat and gloves, Mary Quant was wearing short skirts, white plastic collars to brighten up a black dress and stretch stockings.

Everyone I knew in my teens adored Mary Quant’s fashion designs. She was also our hero with her maxim, ‘The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone.’

The Mini

Jean Shrimpton caused a sensation when she wore a mini skirt to the Melbourne Cup in Australia, 1965. However, we were already wearing minis, as this pic taken in Carnaby Street shows.

We loved the style it was daring and exciting. Wearing a mini skirt or mini dress made us feel incredibly liberated.

While opinions differ on who invented the mini, French designer André Courrèges, John Bates and Jean Varon were among the contenders, it was Mary Quant who commercialised and brought it to the masses. Quant’s mini was simple and playful, modelled in bright fabrics with coloured tights, knee-high boots and Peter Pan collars.

Mary Quant often used PVC, plastic and synthetics in her designs and later expanded her merchandise range to include patterned tights, cosmetics and accessories.

Career Beginnings

Mary Quant was born in Blackheath, London. She never attended a fashion college although she had always wanted to make and design clothes. Mary Quant studied illustrations at Goldsmiths College and failed to get her art teacher’s diploma. Her fashion career began in 1955 in the workrooms of the milliner, Erik.

In November 1955, Mary Quant opened Bazaar in the King’s Road with her future husband, Alexander Plunkett Green. At first, they bought clothes in, but Mary couldn’t find the kind of fashion she wanted. Within a few months she was designing and making her own clothes.

Bazaar sparked a new trend as it became a meeting place, a mecca where the rich treated it as a venue for a kind of continual cocktail party. Boutiques were soon replacing small utility shops along King’s Road as it became the place you’d find the Chelsea Set during the day. It was full of Chelsea girls with their aristocrat and pop-star boyfriends in velvet suits.

The clothes Mary Quant designed, sold almost the moment they were hung onto the shop rails. When she sold her range of mini skirts and dresses in Bazaar, customers were four-deep outside the window. Within ten days, they hardly had a piece of the original merchandise left.

Mary Quant played a huge part in the history of England’s era known as the Swinging Sixties and in making London a major fashion city at a time when Paris was the centre of fashion.

Article and fictional character, ex-pop star, Dottie Pickles © Charlie Clarke 2022