AUTOBIOGRAPHY:In her second autobiography, designer Mary Quant tells how she turned her name into a brand
THIS BOOK, Mary Quant’s second autobiography, is about how Mary Quant the designer became Mary Quant the internationally celebrated brand with the daisy logo. Her first autobiography, equally self-appreciative, was called Quant on Quant and was published in 1966, the year Queen Elizabeth awarded Quant an OBE for services to the fashion industry.
Quant’s mini-skirt, hot pants, wet-look plastic raincoat and all that followed made her the most famous and commercially most successful fashion designer since Chanel and Dior. The new book is imbued with so much creative originality, artistic talent, energy and public-relations know-how that her immodesty seems well earned.
She simultaneously achieved the ultimate in subjective intimacy and in chic erotic notoriety when she persuaded her first husband, Alexander Plunket Greene – APG, as she calls him – to trim her pubic hair into a heart shape. She announced that topiarian feat to the press, and here she fondly relates its public impact: “Well, the sirens went off and when the interview appeared the whole piece was devoted to this quote. It ricocheted everywhere. Strangers in pubs and restaurants bought me a drink on the strength of it. John Lennon adored it and started sending me various ideas of other shapes I could try.”
Unfortunately, she does not divulge what they were. However, she compensates for the omission by telling of the day she ordered steak tartare in a restaurant in Brighton, and the raw minced beef “finally arrived, carefully crafted into a heart-shape. It takes an Italian waiter to have such romantic finesse.”
Mary Quant was born in London on February 11th, 1934, the daughter of Jack and Mary Quant, schoolteachers from Welsh mining families.
Luckily, she was born in time to study art and meet APG at Goldsmiths College in the early 1950s, just when art students were beginning to transform London from post-war gloom into a scene of daring and radiant innovation.
“Everything was changing,” she recalls. “Chelsea was changing. The young were taking over. London was moving from a place of bowler-hatted politeness . . . to becoming the swinging London of ‘youthquake’ legend. Suddenly London was the most provocative and influential city in the world, totally changing popular culture and ideas in the arts, food, fashion, TV, photography, advertising, and most of all music and fashion.”
Fashion is listed twice for emphasis. “London became the place to be, the place to work and enjoy life . . . But the threat that loomed over everyone was National Service, which went on as long as late as 1960. APG only managed to avoid it by deliberately sleeping with the cat, Satchmo (named after Louis Armstrong), the night before his army medical, to bring on his asthma.”
Conscription was associated in young minds with boring old authority and was to be evaded by any means. Similarly, Quant rebelled against tradition by taking fashion from expensive bespoke couture to mass-manufactured pop designs.
IN 1955, WHEN APG inherited £5,000, he used the money to establish Bazaar, a pop-fashion boutique, and Alexander’s Restaurant on Chelsea’s King’s Road, in partnership with Quant and Archie McNair, who was the proprietor of The Fantasy, Chelsea’s first espresso coffee bar. Bazaar and Alexander’s boomed right from the start. “Bazaar became a friendly meeting place for actors, musicians, photographers, models and film directors – an outrageous day-and-night party. . . ”
Like the columnists who reported her interconnected social and commercial life, Quant is a great name-dropper. Her autobiography consists of several pages of photographs, the best ones of herself, and 90 chapters or mini-chapters not much longer than soundbites, with names dropped separately and in wodges throughout. They include those of her dearest friends: Simone Signoret, George Melly, Lulu, Dudley Moore, Michael Caine, John Osborne, Claire Bloom, Susannah York, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Leslie Caron, The Beatles and the Stones, David Bailey, Lord Snowdon, Richard Avedon, Stanley Kubrick, Joe Losey, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. How fascinating. But once the names have been dropped they just lie there; Quant does nothing with them. There is no deliciously scandalous gossip or any other kind.
The book’s glamour resides mainly in recollections of business coups, as she convinces manufacturers to adopt her designs, and her style becomes globally pervasive. Success enables her and her husband to drive E-Type Jaguars and stay in hotels such as La Colombe d’Or in the south of France.
With irresistible confidence, Quant “designed the sort of clothes that my friends in Chelsea and I wanted to wear, such as tunic dresses and knickerbockers and hipster pants, in City-stripe suitings (suit fabrics) and herringbone tweeds. I loved using overtly masculine suiting fabrics and mixing them with fragile feminine textures like chiffon, satin crepe and georgette.”
She has always attracted fans with her deviations from the seasonal colours prescribed by the Premiere Vision trade fabric show. She used some of her boldest colour choices when she founded Quant Cosmetics. Lips and nails did not always have to be red. For clothing, of course, the whole rainbow was available, but she says the most reliable colours of all are black and white, which, she says, may both occur in many subtle variations.
Men were grateful to Mary Quant for designing clothes that revealed women’s thighs. Everyone should be grateful to her for making the world of fashion a democracy and a lot of affordable fun.
Patrick Skene Catling has published novels, and books for children
