Mary Quant
Mary Quant
Dame Barbara Mary Quant, Mrs Plunket Greene, DBE, FCSD, RDIis a Welsh fashion designer and British fashion icon...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionFashion Designer
Date of Birth11 February 1934
favourite mainly market
My favourite Nice restaurant is in the market. It's open mainly for the market people, and shuts in August.
divide life mud open social space swinging time village work
I divide my time between all the mud and open space in Surrey and the social life and work in London, particularly Chelsea, which still has the same village feel that it had in the swinging Sixties.
christmas england full garden heat lunch morning september warm
My garden in England is full of eating-out places, for heat waves, warm September evenings, or lunch on a frosty Christmas morning.
america anyone everybody saw until
Of course, I remember when everybody was thin. It wasn't until I went to America in the Sixties that I saw anyone who wasn't skinny thin.
Of course I remember everything I've ever worn.
complete design
One thing I longed to do was to design a complete look, from head to toe, so I started a make-up line in 1966.
learnt
Many of my friends are chefs, and I learnt to cook watching them.
creators
The real creators of miniskirt are the girls, the same that you seen in the streets.
people
People only see permissiveness in the sense of having more.
I think to myself, 'You lucky woman - how did you have all this fun?'
ended gardens hoping life people returned revert ten war
Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.
allowed clothes created freedom last moved people precious reason retain saw worked
I saw no reason why childhood shouldn't last forever. So I created clothes that worked and moved and allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.
bowler carrying opened tightly wearing
When I opened my first shop, city gents were still carrying tightly furled umbrellas and wearing bowler hats. It was into this world that I launched my new ideas about fashion.
countries
I still like the King's Road. It is very alive; it is a hustle of things from different countries and so on. It is lovely.