Miniskirt queen Mary Quant liberated our legs — and our sheltered Irish souls

Surfing the zeitgeist of Sixties London, she took old, penniless, parsimonious, patriarchal and exhausted post-war Britain by the scruff of its pants — and booted it out the door.

Goodbye corsets, bye-bye roll-ons (vile rubberised corsets without bones), cinched waists, voluminous American skirts, and hairy tweedy Anglo skirts. All went into the bin.

Instead, a welcome mat was laid out for miniskirts, coloured tights, skinny rib jumpers, silver (silver!) tights, pinafores, PVC raincoats with sexy sou’westers in pink, striped hotpants and white knee-high boots.

Women everywhere wore Mary Q miniskirts to signify modernity, liberation, freedom

Everything was cast in brilliant colours, and topped with a Vidal Sassoon bob.

“Life is marvellous,” said Mary. “I want women to feel marvellous in their clothes. I want them to be able to dance, to run, to jump.”

Straight out of a convent boarding school in Tipperary, this came as a clarion call to my starving heart. It was sensational stuff.

Feel marvellous in clothes? Run and jump and dance in clothes?

Yes, said Mary. The point of wearing them was, she assured us, (a) that you’re noticed, (b) that you look sexy, and (c) that you feel good.

After years in dreary school uniforms — sky blue for weekdays, navy blue for weekends — where rolling up the sleeves of your cardigan was considered common and therefore forbidden, Mary’s message was unimaginably liberating.

London gents in bowler hats rapped on the window of her shop with their furled umbrellas. Disgusting! Outrageous! How dare she put forward clothes like this?

Their wives, stuck at home in the shires with their tweeds and horses and babies, agreed. Disgusting.

We laughed like drains. What did they know? The old fuddy-duddies!

Mary was making London the swinging fashion capital of the world — and we were all on board.

Saturday mornings involved a pilgrimage to 138a Kings Road where we would stand outside the window of Bazaar to marvel at her latest creations. We’d shove each other, staring longingly at the unimaginably skinny and beautiful models, such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, wearing Mary’s latest creations.

After feasting our eyes and our starving spirits and then having our café-au-lait in glühwein glasses in the French café (it was the height of sophistication), we would hurry home to slash inches off skirts, dresses, frocks, stick on false eyelashes, paint on layer after layer of kohl — and attempt to prune our Irish locks into something resembling Mary’s iconic Vidal Sassoon bob.

Starting at the affordable end of things, we bought her coloured tights (coloured tights!!!) and bright green or yellow nail polish. We haunted the second-hand shops for Mary Q cast-offs. Anything to try and re-create the London look — skinny, sassy, cheeky, beholden to no man.

We had the pill. We had Mary Q, and we had Biba. Heaven on earth.

Mary Quant wasn’t just a purveyor of dreams. She was also seriously practical. She began her career as many a designer/writer/artist has  — sick in bed, aged six and bored. So she took her nail scissors to the bedspread and made a dress.

Her mum’s response to that is unrecorded — but her parents, both schoolteachers from Wales, did allow her go to Goldsmiths College as long as she got a teacher’s diploma. She spent her evenings taking pattern-cutting classes.

She met her husband, and life and business partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, at a Goldsmiths ball and between them they set up Bazaar — Mary’s first boutique. He ran a restaurant in the basement. From there, boot-strapping their way to the top, her kingdom spread out to influence women across the entire globe.

Women everywhere wore Mary Q miniskirts to signify modernity, liberation, freedom from the patriarchy.

When one snooty interviewer observed that not everyone had the legs to look “magnificent” in a miniskirt, Mary looked at him in genuine horror.

“Who wants to look magnificent?” she asked.

She believed fashion was for everyone — not just the aristos at Ascot. She even signed a contract with patternmakers Butterick so we office girls could spend our evenings knocking up our own Mary Quant pinnies, dresses, minis and hotpants.

Quant took everyday items, ripped them asunder and re-made them for the new generation of young women with jobs, money, and attitudes. She was the original de-constructor. She removed linings, interfacing, structure itself.

“The problem is,” she once explained, “women are round, and fabric is flat. I wanted to make clothes rounder. Freer.”

Heather Tilbury, who worked for her, said she was quite shy but had a “steely certainty”.

She wasn’t just an icon because she made beautiful clothes, democratised fashion, and opened the door for us feel entitled to feel sexy and free — she was also incredibly successful at a time when women entrepreneurs were scarcer than hen’s teeth.

Dressed always in her own creations, she showed the way. Thrilling to her dynamism and optimism, we followed in our millions.

Rest in power, beautiful Mary. You didn’t just liberate our legs, you liberated our souls as well.

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