Much about the Mini, Quant’s lasting legacy for the fashion world

It was midway through the 1950s that a British designer, Mary Quant, and her husband opened a boutique called Bazaar in London, selling items of women’s clothing and accessories the likes of which few had seen until then — short flared skirts and pinafores, knee socks and tights, funky jewellery and berets among others. The novelty lay in the fact that the items jettisoned the class and age look of the earlier generation. By the next decade, the mid-60s to be precise, Quant would become a global brand and her miniskirt would become a rage. For her contributions to British exports, she would receive the Order of the British Empire in 1966. When she visited the US with her new collection, she was greeted in a way that reminded people of the rapturous welcome accorded to the Beatles, or the Fab Four, an earlier British export of a different kind that wowed the American youth.

The ‘Mother of Miniskirt’, as she was called, Quant died on April 13, aged 93, at her home in Surrey, England.

During the decade, mini, used both as a noun or an adjectival prefix, would spawn a whole lot of word formations, some of which could be traced to earlier decades too. The miniskirt, the archetypal 1960s garment, symbolised at once the exuberance of the baby-boom teenagers and the sexual permissiveness the decade has come to be associated with. Used as a noun, Mini would stand for miniskirt itself. A dress with a miniskirt would be called a minidress. With rising hemlines, 1968 also saw the use of micro for a microskirt.

Mini (noun) was known since the 1940s as an abbreviation for minicar, a term used as a name of a type of three-wheeled car made by British firm Bond. Mini itself was first used in 1959 as part of the proprietory name, Mini-Minor, of a small car manufactured originally by the British Motor Corporation. By 1961, the name was shortened to Mini.

Mini as an adjectival prefix refers to something which is small or tiny. One of its popular usages, mini-budget, refers to a budget of limited scope coming between the main annual budgets. Its first used is traced to 1966 in Times Review of Industry.

Interestingly, the word maxiskirt (borrowing maxi from maximum), referring to articles of clothing which are very long or large, too appeared in the mid-1960s in reaction to the miniskirt and was followed by maxidress and maxicoat, which came in vogue by the end of the decade and the beginning of the next.

The word minimal too traces its origin to the Swinging Sixties and was applied specifically to abstract painting and sculpture eschewing expressiveness and using simple geometric shapes, and in the 1970s to music based on simple elements. The related words minimalism and minimalist are first recorded in the late 1960s.

Coming back to Quant, though the French fashion designer Andre Courreges is credited with the invention of the miniskirt, it was she who ensured that her raised hemline remained a style statement across continents and through the decades.

In her autobiography, Quant on Quant, she referred to her boutique as “a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories”. That’s a tongue-twister there. But if you go looking for its meaning, you may find it quite delectable.