Quant, Mary

Mary Quant, in full Dame Mary Quant, (born February 11, 1934fashion designer of youth-oriented fashions, responsible in the 1960s for the “Chelsea look” of England and the widespread popularity of the miniskirt and “hot pants.”

Quant attended Goldsmith’s College of Art, London, and spent two years designing hats for the Danish milliner Erik. In partnership with her husband and a friend, she opened a boutique, called Bazaar, on the King’s Road in London in 1957. It was an immediate success, and within seven years the company had expanded throughout Europe and the United States and was mass-producing designs on a multimillion-dollar annual scale.

British postage stamp with Mary Quant's work

Quant’s designs reflected a shift in fashion from the establishment to youth as the source of inspiration. Her best-known fashions of the 1960s were similar in feeling to the outfits worn by little girls to dancing class—short pleated skirts, white anklets, and black patent-leather ankle-strap shoes. In the early 1970s, Quant stopped manufacturing but continued to design clothing, furs, lingerie, household linens, and eyeglass frames. She also continued to direct the cosmetics business that she had started in 1955 until its sale in 2000.

Quant was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1966 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015. From 1973 to 1974 she held a retrospective exhibition of 1960s fashion at the London Museum, and from 1976 to 1978 Quant worked on the advisory council for the Victoria and Albert Museum. An international retrospective of her work was held at the latter in 2019. She chronicled her life in the books Quant by Quant (1966) and Mary Quant: Autobiography (2012).