Mary Quant – A Revolutionary with a Playful Streak

Mary Quant Exhibition in Taiwan / 2022.05.28-2022.08.28

Mary Quant embarked on her world-changing career in fashion around 70 years ago, opening her first boutique, Bazaar, in Chelsea, London, in 1955, amid the charred surrounding of a post-war bleakness. Yet, her fashions transcend the decades and couldn’t be more refreshing and relevant today, in 2022. On the two occasions I have attended her retrospective, titled Mary Quant – A Fashion Revolutionary – staged at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and running from 26/05/2022 to 28/08/2022, there has been ample evidence that visitors, many of them young women who could clearly be called “fashionable”, have enthusiastically engaged with the exhibits, photographing mannequins and dolls on display and standing for extended periods watching the footage and listening to the testimony to the pioneering fashions of Mary Quant. 

As well as resonating through the ages, the clothes on show here, along with the verve and playfulness with which Quant imbued them, have evidently succeeded in enchanting attendees, bridging both temporal and cultural distances. Quant stands as a champion of female emancipation, self-expression and sheer appetite for life, an impression clearly borne out in the tastes and irreverent attitudes of those young admirers viewing her designs.

It becomes very quickly apparent that Quant’s fashions are the fruits of a particularly appealing personal vision and taste which chimed with the pent-up needs of the young, or “absolute beginners” as Colin MacInnes called them in his 1958 novel of the same name, amid the threadbare environs. As is so often the case with art and culture produced in the 1960s, when scrutinized, it is found to have been born in the more spiritually constrained 1950s, and the show’s first of six sections, “Birth of the Boutique (1955-1960)”, aptly demonstrates this with satin and “wrap-over” dresses, grey cloth, high-necked and figure-hugging. These early dresses obey the decorum of the decade, conforming to the standards of feminine beauty of the era; this was the decade of Reynolds Woodcock and haute couture, when Italy created la dolce vita while nothing much in London swung. 

One memorable dress is in pale mauve satin, sleeveless and with understated sheen, its waist nipped-in and adorned with a fetching bow. It is surprisingly subtle, evoking a restrained adult sensuality. Another is high-necked, its four large buttons and softly contoured silhouette seems to demand a finer deportment. Also in this first section, Quant first appears on a large video screen, still in a black-and-white world, busy in her workshop collaborating with her staff, endlessly exploring options, always playful, yet with a searching insight. Indeed, the first bold steps to the more colorful and vibrant fashions, and the utter liberation in the statements they made lay just around the corner in the early 1960s. 

Viewed in sequence with the next section of the exhibition, which is tellingly titled “Death of the Debutant (1960-62), they palpably reflect this transition. Here, the exhibits reveal a refreshing and energizing splash of color – magenta, canary yellow, hot pink, apricot – and the impact of the change in style and intensity are felt; unleashed on the streets are the bold “free-flowing feminine lines that compliment a woman’s shape”. Also emerging was a parody of male sartorial staples and the masculine traditions behind them as she draws inspiration from military uniforms and Bank of England suits in her use of wool tailoring cloth. Of course, Mary Quant is remembered for the mini-skirt, but, as the quaint phrase goes, “her knee-skimming outfits” heralded the “shock of the knee”.

Marshalling the visual paraphernalia, curator Jenny Lister generates excitement, revealing that, even in this age of constantly accessible visual images in Pinterest, Etsy and other media, such a well-chosen selection of fashions can leave visitors wanting to see more. The sample range was wide and demonstrative, in its way documenting the youthful march of most vibrant of British fashion from a specifically London aesthetic and context, and how that context exploded to become global. This stretches from her nascent brilliance in the late 1950s, to her apogee of the early to mid-1960s, then on into the late 1960s and 1970s when events of the counterculture informed her designs, and her appeal was universal. 

Pop art-inspired geometric shapes and bright cherry red PVC raincoats represented her wet look. Although, when seen on the page in magazines, Quant’s styles have always looked much more engaging than simply flashy, in this show, the detail and quality in terms of cut are evident as you see them at close quarters as with garments like a figure-hugging “lace dress” in apricot designed in 1964. Gazing up at the storky mannequin, the delicate curves of her Sassoon-sculpted bob, the intricate lacework of ovoid shapes, the slightly scalloped neck and slender cut, she looks in a dream. This dress drops to a couple of inches above her knees and suggests the lithe and fine-boned figure its wearer.

This quality, and the quirky poses of the mannequins – all slightly different - are pleasing on the eye: again, Lister deserves huge credit for this. Another one has closed eyelids, her straight-cut fringe contrasted with the softness of her outwardly curling hair and high cheekbones, hands resting daintily on each hip in haughty youthful defiance, in mock imperiousness, she strikes a contraposta. Her magenta pinafore dress has an exuberant orange border at the hem and her elongated frame brings the memories of rationing young girls would have experienced as children. Equally, the selection of John French’s classic photographer fit in with the professionalism of the whole presentation. 

Lister also brings motion to those garments. The difficulty involved in bringing static mannequins to life to convey the sense of fluidity and movement is aided by video footage on five large screens cleverly spaced throughout the exhibition, smartly paced in termed of chronology, giving the viewer a sense of how the clothes must have looked in motion on moving body. 

Similarly, the element of sound is rendered well. The peppy and jazzy soundtrack of one clip, in spite of the narrator’s clipped accent, his throw-away jollity, with remarks such as “panties on a line” should be seen on a woman’s body, show the permissiveness of the times. However, this footage reveals that there is no doubt about the slickness and vibrancy of her fashion shows. Jingly pop plays as one of the videos shows models, mini-skirted, one with a Bob Dylan cap, capering in a jeep which careens down the Chelsea streets and takes a dip in the Thames: the girls, giggling and skipping as they take photos, then cavort in a sedate park among to tulip beds to the consternation of the staid denizens. Amusingly, despite its rebellious nature, the whole escapade is as English as a Dorset meadow. 

The show is also punctuated by extended clips of Quant speaking point blank to camera, to us; her frankness is winning, and visitors frequently stopped for the complete loop. Her sense of being a mere mortal, after all, comes to the fore as she confesses to being “messy’ when applying make-up and most of the shoes she’d ever bought being uncomfortable. Female visitors have a relatable role model and can also admire her obvious business acumen. 

Her revolution was one of playfulness and inclusivity; she encouraged working girls to be liberated, “borrowing from the boys” and invited the male gaze, not inciting a gender war. On shoots, the models’ mockery of the beefeaters and guardsmen in their busbies is in part a celebration of those traditions’ customed pomp, while the men who are the targets enjoy a wry, and somewhat bemused, smile. Quant often mentioned the word “sexy” when laying out her vision, but a sexiness that is very much on the girls’ terms, with her own youthful zest as its embodiment.

Redolent of the 1960s mood, satire enters the fray as Quant’s styles provide a superbly camp subversion of the symbols of the male-dominated establishment. They are gently teased in the form of pinstriped waistcoats of city gents, pinafore dresses with ties, bright red tunics of the royal guardsmen, and men’s fedoras such as the “Rex Harrison”. “English Eccentrics (1960-64)” also re-imagines Victorian frilly collars, high collars made of stiff materials, bloomers, all centered on the gamine, boyish look of the 1920s. Evidence of this sea change in culture is that she drew inspiration form the young working girls of London, saying of them in 1966, “these girls don’t worry about accent (or status); they are the mods”, while “not wanting to look like a duchess” was equally the case.                

Much as Tim Walker’s Wonderful Things photographic exhibition in the Chimei Museum in Tainan did this winter past, this show succeeds in arousing a Taiwanese audience’s curiosity to enjoy the cultural depth on offer, striking a chord in the process of transcending cultural and language barriers.

One irony may be that Quant, once the impish upstart, has become canonical and her influence omnipresent. On leaving the exhibition, a slight tinge of melancholy crept into my mind; thoughts of what Mark Fisher termed as “yesterday’s vision of the future” played out, along with the sense that mankind has now reached a post-modern dead end and the postponement, or abandonment, of past hopes and strivings of the kind of bright tomorrow Mary Quant succeeded in creating. But good faith dispelled this momentary anxiety, and the realization that I had had a joyous encounter which had validated the power of great style’s ability to fundamentally enhance life dawned, then broke into a summer’s day in the King’s Road during the “high 1960s” amid the parading “dolly girls”, male dandies, fun and optimism.