British fashion designer Mary Quant, mastermind of Swinging ’60s style, dies at 93

Mary Quant, the visionary fashion designer whose colourful, sexy miniskirts epitomised London in the 1960s and influenced youth culture worldwide, has died. She was 93.

Quant’s family said she died “peacefully at home” in Surrey, southern England, on Thursday.

Quant helped popularise the miniskirt — some credit her with inventing it — and the innovative tights and accessories that were an integral part of the look. She also created dresses and other simple mix-and-match garments that had an element of whimsy.

Some compared her impact on the fashion world with The Beatles’ impact on pop music.

“I think it was a happy confluence of events, which is really what fashion is so often all about,” said Hamish Bowles, international editor at large for American Vogue magazine. “She was the right person with the right sensibility in the right place at the right time. She appeared on the scene at the exact cusp of the ‘60s.”

Quant was also an astute businesswoman and one of the first to understand how branding herself as a creative force could help her sustain her business and branch out into new fields, like cosmetics, he said.

Alexandra Shulman, former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, wrote on Twitter: “RIP Dame Mary Quant. A leader of fashion but also in female entrepreneurship - a visionary who was much more than a great haircut.”

Quant introduced miniskirts with hemlines up to 20cm above the knee to the London scene in 1966 and they were an instant hit with young people, partly because they shocked and offended their elders.

While some insist she first developed the style, many also credit French designer Andre Courreges, whose 1964 spring collection included minidresses that were popular in Paris but did not have a widespread impact outside France. Others cite the short skirts worn by actress Anne Francis in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet as the first example of the miniskirt.

Whether or not she was the first to design them, it was Quant who figured out how to market miniskirts to the masses.

Quant, who named the skirt after her favourite make of car, the Mini, recalled how it offered a “feeling of freedom and liberation”. From her shop on King’s Road in London’s trendy Chelsea neighbourhood, she was part of a clothing revolution.

“It was the girls on King’s Road who invented the mini. I was making clothes which would let you run and dance and we would make them the length the customer wanted,” she said. “I wore them very short and the customers would say, ‘shorter, shorter’.”

Asked by the Guardian newspaper in 1967 if her clothes could be considered “vulgar” because they were so revealing, Quant replied that she loved vulgarity and embraced it.

Quant was also credited with introducing hot pants and micro-minis to the fashion scene in the late 1960s.

She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for service to the fashion industry in 1966, wearing a miniskirt when she received the honour at Buckingham Palace. In 2014, she was made a dame — the female equivalent of a knight — for services to British fashion.

At the start of this year, she was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, a royal honour restricted to 65 people “of distinction” in the arts, science, medicine or government.

Quant stepped down from the day-to-day management of her firm, Mary Quant Ltd., in 2000 after it was purchased by a Japanese company, but kept working as a consultant.

The firm continued to use the daisy motif and logo that Quant pioneered in the 1960s, and it long maintained a shop in London, in addition to roughly 200 shops in Japan.

- AP with edits