Opinion Express View: Mary Quant revolutionised women’s fashion, helped liberate the female body

If the history of women’s fashion is the history of the freedom to move without restriction, few individuals have done more for the liberation of the female body than Mary Quant, the British designer who died this week at 93. After the rejection of the whale-bone corset and the adoption of trousers in the first half of the 20th century, the next great change in women’s clothing in the west came in the 1960s, the decade in which second wave feminism rose and the pill ushered in a sexual revolution. In her boutique in London’s Chelsea, Quant began selling the miniskirt — a garment that, with its thigh-grazing hemline, shocked “men in bowler hats”, but thrilled other young women who, like the designer, were too busy, too much on the move and too full of the zest for life, to be held back by old conventions.

While Quant is hailed as the inventor of the miniskirt, she gave credit to “the girls on King’s Road”, saying that she had merely drawn inspiration from them. There is no question, however, over the outsized role she played in popularising above-the-knee hemlines, creating outfits that, with their bold, playful use of patterns, colour and material, were fun, sexy and modern. Worn by the “It girls” of the day — Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Brigitte Bardot — the miniskirt made Quant one of the most popular designers of the day.

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Quant’s belief that “the fashionable woman wears clothes…clothes don’t wear her” underpinned all her experiments — solid tights, jersey dresses, skinny-rib sweaters — that have stood the test of time. Her’s was a practical philosophy, one that argued for women to wear whatever felt comfortable, as they moved, worked, partied or lounged at home. The mini that she championed — and frequently wore with aplomb herself — was a small garment. Its impact, however, was anything but.