Original subtitles

I think the point of fashion

is not to get bored with looking at somebody.

I think the point of clothes... for women,

to be, one, that you're noticed.

Two, that you look sexy.

And three, that you feel good.

I can't see that we wear them to keep warm.

Mary, somehow, knew what a girl in the street wanted.

The miniskirt.

She just picked up what was in their subconscious.

We wanted to dance to The Beatles.

(SCREAMING)

We wanted to wear miniskirts.

We didn't want to look like a duchess.

Who turned the miniskirt into a worldwide phenomenon?

And without a doubt, it was Mary Quant.

Youth at the time was a lot about wearing something

that older people didn't like.

Oh, I can't say that I particularly approve.

English fashion has always been notoriously rebellious.

She was an innovator, she was a rule-breaker,

she empowers women.

Clothes are a sort of statement about oneself,

or what one wants to be.

What she did was liberate those girls.

She gave them a context.

It was a really rich period of change.

And fashion was a huge part of this.

If a designer really catches a fashion editor's eye,

anything is possible, really.

This amazing British woman

with this sense of freedom and disruption and innovation

really created a global look.

I found it difficult to believe when I first met her,

that she really was this bundle of dynamite

that had changed everything in fashion

from the way it was previously.

I think, in a funny way, must have anticipated what people wanted.

Was this just chance, do you think?

Absolute chance, absolute luck. I mean, I think luck really is timing.

# On our block, all of the guys

# Call her Flamingo

# Cos her hair glows like the sun

# And her eyes can light the skies

# When she walks, she moves so fine

# Like a flamingo

# When she walks by

# She brightens up the neighbourhood

# Oh, every guy

# Would make her his if he just could

# If she just would. #

I really think it, in a way, goes back to the war.

It was an extraordinary reaction with the end of the war

when we'd won the war and lost so much at the same time.

There was a new generation came romping through,

with huge confidence and, er, high spirit.

And the generation that should have been controlling everything

just let us do it.

You were brought up in Wales, in Pembrokeshire.

What sort of childhood did you have?

Oh, blissful, because I loved Pembrokeshire.

My brother more or less ran wild, you know, with the cliffs

and studying the birds and scrambling.

We'd take off in the morning and just...

That doesn't sound like the daughter

of Welsh Baptist schoolteachers somehow.

Well, the war was on, you know, we were being shunted

from one school to another and managed to escape school,

you know, whole summers on end.

I think Mary Quant had a really extraordinary time

during the Second World War.

I mean, she roamed a bit wild round the countryside,

playing cricket and hanging out with her brother Tony

and having...just having a good time.

A sort of quite tomboyish existence almost.

And I think maybe that period of relative freedom

really stayed with her.

I was the usual split personality as a child.

One minute climbing trees, only wanting to play with the boys

and throw stones and steal apples and all the rest of it.

But equally, there's the other side where I adored dolls and clothes.

Most girls are guided in their dress sense by their mothers.

How were you dressed when you were a child?

A cousin who was a very good little girl, never wore her clothes out.

And though they were completely right for her,

I knew they were wrong for me. I had a square face and I was...

..a tough, stomping thing, not pretty at all.

And they were just utterly wrong, I knew this from the age of three

and became completely self-conscious about clothes from that date on.

I used to start doing things to my school uniform,

hitching it up to be more daring.

I liked my skirts short

mainly because I wanted to run and catch the bus.

I saw no reason why my childhood shouldn't last forever.

It seemed to me all naturalness went as you grew up

and you had to wear these terrible artificial things.

I thought children were much more beautiful

and I wanted to keep this element of youngness in clothes.

The day I was 13, I cried all day cos old age had struck.

This meant what to you?

Growing up meant to me getting into stockings and suspenders.

What do you call them, garters, don't you?

And high heels and having artificial hair and artificial nails.

You know, bosom that came into the room

about two minutes before the rest of you.

And all the horrors of what appeared to me being adult would bring on.

The leftover from the end of the '40s

and the very early '50s

was still celebrating

the hourglass figure.

The big moment in fashion, post-war,

was absolutely the arrival of Christian Dior's new look,

which was actually, in a way,

sort of a reaction or response to the tragedy and horror of war

and a desire to return to a time pre-war, a more nostalgic time.

In the beginning of the 20th century,

fashion simply wasn't a very English thing to do.

I think the French owned it, really.

The period of the '50s is often described as

a golden age of couture, and it was,

but couture, of course, is about making

specific dresses and clothes for specific customers

for a super-elite, a super-rich, entitled clientele in Paris.

That world was so restrictive and so small

that...a generation of new young women grew up

who wanted something reflective of the modern era.

I hated fashion the way it was. I wanted clothes to be

far more casual and easy-going and yet sort of sexy and things.

We didn't want to look like duchess

and we certainly didn't want to look like a duchess

the way a duchess looked two years ago.

I wanted to design clothes for real, live people.

I wanted to design clothes for young people.

You got a lot of your basic ideas for design,

or your training in design and thinking out of design,

from art college.

Contemporary culture owes almost everything, I think,

to the art school culture in the UK in the '50s and '60s.

Do you think you'd have been just as good a designer

if you hadn't been to the art school?Oh, no.

And I think I was lucky that I had a general training

rather than being allowed to specialise so early.

I went to some cutting classes,

found myself a table there

and got on with what I wanted to do.

Nobody said, no, you're not supposed to do it like that.

So there I was, I just started making and designing

clothes for...people like me, you know, other art students.

When I was at Goldsmith's

we went up to the Royal College for the Friday night dances.

That was where it was happening, as the phrase was at the time.

It was good because we understood each other's art.

We were all one gang, really.

The thing about Mary is that she's a nice, Welsh country girl, really,

come up to London, and she meets Alexander,

who is this long, gangly aristocrat.

Fun loving...

..confident person.

There was a lot of theatre with my dad.

He spent most of his time at Goldsmith's walking around

with a film cannister under his arm

cos he was involved in some kind of film project.

You know, he had a way about him,

he had a charm and charisma that just, you know,

just whipped everybody up

and wants to go along for, you know, this amazing ride.

He lived a lifestyle that was very, um...intoxicating.

You know, he very much was a muse and, er...

..and an inspiration for her.

How did I meet her? Well, I didn't meet her the first time.

The first time was at the Chelsea Arts Ball,

end of my first term at art school.

I hadn't seen her at the art school, it was a big place,

but on the great float which came past,

which was our art school's float,

was this enormous pile of balloons

with this practically naked girl sitting on top, and, um...

..I didn't exactly fall in love with her at first sight,

but I just had this great sort of surge of lust.

And I determined to try and make friends with her next term.

So I found out where she was, that sort of thing,

and joined the same life class. I was terribly shy.

One day, I just went up and said,

"Could I borrow some drawing pins cos I don't have any?" She said yes.

So I was so emboldened by that,

I, um...asked her to the cinema or something that evening and she came.

And, er...

..we never looked back, except in anger, since then. (CHUCKLING)

They very quickly became an item,

which in those days was rather frowned upon.

He was, like, really tall, six foot two,

and all the girls loved him, kind of like

a bit of an impoverished aristocrat.

And he had this kind of air of confidence about him,

and Mary was... Obviously they adored each other

because they complemented each other.

He had all those qualifications

of knowing people who were socialites,

and she had that inner resilience, curiosity, creativity.

I think what Alexander brought to the party was a sort of insouciance

and devil-may-care-ness.

I think it was like, yeah, whatever, let's be bad.

Let's be even worse than bad, let's be...let's push...

..the social mores as far as we can.

He...he realised that that needed to be done.

What I want to know first of all, Mary Quant, is whether

you saw yourself, right at the beginning, as a revolutionary.

No. We saw ourselves as sort of outcasts, really,

and trying to... somehow gang together in Chelsea,

er, with a very few other people who felt as outcast as we did.

Why were you outcasts?Just didn't like the way things were,

didn't like the way things looked, the way people lived.

My first job was in a workroom making hats at £2 10s a week

for rich people and duchesses and Lady This and Lady That.

And it would take me five days

to make one hat for one Lady Bloggs to go to Ascot,

and it would rain and she'd bring it back next day

and say, "My husband doesn't like it." And the whole thing...

It got through to me that this was

unrealistic, out of date and nonsense.

That one person couldn't spend five days making a hat for one woman.

That was tough, cos I had to live on it.

Things were rather grim then.

Were they so very grim?

They were a bit gloomy if you were very young.

You had no money, no independence.

We wanted a more casual way of life and a pleasanter way of life.

When you see the coffee bars came along, this was another revolution.

I met Mary Quant through her boyfriend then,

Alexander Plunket Greene, in my coffee bar.

Er...and got to know him. He used to...

My father, Archie McNair,

was one of the funders of the Mary Quant business.

And he was the... he was the chairman of Mary Quant,

I think, from the start of it, until when he retired in 1987.

He didn't look the part at all.

When I first met him, I think he was wearing a bowler hat,

umbrella and briefcase, all this sort of thing,

and I thought, good God, but in fact made great friends with him.

He was the first person to see what was happening in Chelsea, clearly,

from any point of view, from our point of view

and from a commercial point of view.

One of his early ventures was a coffee bar,

at number 128, King's Road.

He had the first... I think he had

the second espresso machine in London in the mid-'50s.

The King's Road was the place. Everyone went down the King's Road,

for coffee houses more than anything.

Although it's very fashionable now,

it was far more colourful and it was just very exciting.

Gradually, a lot of young people started showing their creativity,

whether they were painters or artists or poets

or film-makers or photographers and would-be models.

Everybody sort of intermingled, and it was a really good, fun buzz.

There were lots of these kind of young people's club,

I don't know what you call them, R

The old trad bands would try and funk up the music a bit.

But it changed the whole shape of...

..what English musicians were doing.

It was all up for grabs, you know?

You know, this was 10 years before The Beatles, I suppose,

or getting on that way, and I wore hair more or less

down to my shoulders, and Mary wore skirts halfway up her thighs,

and everybody else was wearing them four or five inches below the knee.

I think that when you meet really special artists,

musicians and designers who've got a special talent like that,

they can't help themselves, and it will come out one way or another.

I'd become more and more interested in this idea of, um...

..well, at least that there were a few people like me who didn't want

these clothes that existed even before you got into them.

I had this girlfriend who was interested in clothes,

and I was interested in clothes too,

and he was interested in expanding his businesses in the King's Road,

so we all three got together, and that was the start of it.

I persuaded them...

..to start a little shop in the King's Road, which we called Bazaar.

I didn't know anything about clothes and fashions and so forth.

But I did have faith in Alexander and Mary.

I thought they were both able people and likely to get it right.

Alexander had the promotional skills,

Mary had the creativity,

and Archie McNair, who had trained as a lawyer,

was a businessman.

I think they put up about £5,000 each, and we started Bazaar,

I suppose the first boutique in London,

and I made the clothes for it, and it was, you know,

where fools step in, nobody said you can't do it. We just did it.

When she opened Bazaar in 1955,

the sort of thing she wanted to sell in Bazaar just wasn't available.

So she knew she'd got to design and make it herself.

We used to go into various manufacturers

and say we want to buy some dresses.

If they weren't absolutely rude, they'd pretend to take an order,

the stuff wouldn't turn up

because they didn't believe in these kids with a shop.

The thing was, we opened the door of the shop and there was a queue,

people were four deep outside and flooded in.

Bazaar was a vitally, lively, little boutique

and it was like a light went on. I mean, it was just fantastic colour

and exuberant and young.

Young.

So it was a sort of social scene as well.

It was very unorthodox. People had to take their clothes off

in the middle of the floor and try things on out of a packing case,

because there was really only one changing room.

It was such a success, we were just bowled over from the day we opened.

And what I find amazing was the windows.

You know, the fact that she realised that

the mannequins were all completely wrong for the clothes she was doing

and had these mannequins made in really cute, sort of boxy shapes.

And suddenly seeing these windows

with these lithe, sporty mannequins,

and these clothes that we actually wanted to buy ourselves,

had nothing to do with our mothers.

And she really designed on sort of an ad-hoc basis,

she had no formal training as a fashion designer.

They were buying buy-direct patterns and adapting them.

They were being sewn up in the flat,

she'd take them to the shop to sell them, then go and buy more fabric.

And that's really how it started.

I design for myself and for my friends.

But enough of them bought your clothes

to keep you afloat at the beginning. Yes, rather too many.

It exploded, sort of, under us,

and I think we spent many years dashing along trying to keep up.

She was an early mod,

very cool and very streamlined looks.

A fashion that really rebelled against

everything that we saw in the 1950s.

I remember buying an outfit of Mary's.

It was purple, for a start.

And I'd never seen anything purple before,

but it was a sort of tight top and swinging skirt

that did actually move when you walked.

In the clothes that she created,

you could run for the bus, do what you want, you felt great.

I think Mary became so successful

because she literally gave people clothes they could move in.

I mean, there weren't clothes you could move in.

The clothes were very short and very supple.

The shoes were very flat, so you could run, dance, jump, you know.

In fact, all the clothes are very simple,

but put together they have a very strong look that said somehow,

"Look at me. Isn't life marvellous?"

The modern look is sexy...

..witty...

..polished...and dry-cleaned.

It may seem a very everyday concept now,

but she was the first person, really,

that designed pinafore dresses.

They could wear a skinny-rib sweater underneath

during the day when they were working,

put different shoes on and go straight out in the evening.

I think Mary Quant's use of textiles were key to what she did.

Rough tweeds, she used linens, plain fabrics, simple colours,

and she really wanted to create

something youthful and sophisticated.

Lots of people had gingham curtains in the kitchen,

but nobody had ever made a red-and-white gingham skirt.

I think it must have been copied

by every girl who walked past the window of Bazaar.

I loved all those bold black and whites.

I bought men's suitings from Harrods

to make dresses from these pink, striped men's suitings

of Prince of Wales checks and things like that.

She had this kind of way of changing classics.

I did a shoot

and the editor tried to explain to me about the male cardigan

that became the female cardigan, it was because of Mary Quant.

Persuaded knitwear manufacturers to make men's cardigans,

like Rex Harrison cardigans, but 10 inches longer,

which was a very short dress length.

And had elongated shirts made like court dresses.

She would take the undergarments that men would wear,

jersey in particular, and turn them into the kind of clothes

that became the Mary Quant statement.

Mary really understood colour.

She'd put two or three colours together, and you think, what?

And then, when you put them together, they looked amazing.

The colours were strong, with the parroty greens and blue and plum

and yellow ochre and pinafores and so on.

And the legs would be covered in the same sort of colour.

I persuaded theatrical manufacturers to make tights

in all the colours of the clothes.

We didn't have tights before

before Mary Quant, we had stockings.

She invented tights, if you like.

She designed for the girls in the street, ordinary girls.

She just picked up what was in their subconscious.

And that was the magic about her products.

As soon as people saw it, they went for it.

She had a very clear vision.

She was always quite clear on what she wanted.

And it took off, and in two years they'd opened a second Bazaar,

which was much larger,

and that was completely designed by Terence Conran.

And then it just went from there.

The clothes I produced were so acceptable

to the Chelsea girl at that time.

She was far more emancipated than the equivalent French girl.

The young in England were in that mood.

It is handy if you can discover, or seem to discover,

a trend in society. Now, I'm only asking you

whether you felt conscious that you were pioneering a trend.

No, I didn't, I really didn't.

But you see, I think this is what a designer is.

I feel a designer has to be someone who's permanently bored,

permanently bored with the way people look at any particular time.

One should live in the future,

wanting to change things.

When fashion resonates,

it's always in tune with activism, in some respects.

And when you look at the chronology of politics,

especially feminist politics,

you can kind of see how fashion has evolved.

So when you put the spotlight on the '60s and on Mary Quant,

there's a clear correlation between the women's movement

and the clothes that she was designing.

Now!What do we want?

Equal education!

What do we want?

Some men have still got the idea of the Victorian era,

you know, where they come home drunk and bash you about,

you're only good enough to have children and get married.

You should be allowed to have your own feelings, your own life,

not be dominated by men all the time.

It's ridiculous because half the men of this world are wrong

in any bloody case, you know what I mean?

I want to be understood.

Sure you do, Susan.

We all want to be understood.

Even your mother.

I think a woman had to be and had to dress

and had to act the part of the way the man in her life saw her.

And she was never allowed to dress...

..just the part of being her.

They were sort of perfect princesses,

cooking and cleaning for their husbands,

wearing immaculate sort of twinsets and pearls

and petticoats and lace.

But don't forget your greatest attachment, your husband.

Clothes are a sort of statement about...

..oneself, or what one wants to be.

It was about responding to a need in women,

responding to not just a need,

but a demand that they have clothes that reflected who they were.

# And don't tell me what to do... #

Given the pill was the only contraceptive that actually worked,

a woman could then really be in charge of her own life,

decide when she has children.

# Don't put me on display... #

The pill, contraception, helped to...

..liberate you. It did.

# ..To be free

# To live my life the way I want... #

And this allows them to plan both a private life, family life,

and a career life.

Mary's vision was to bring clothes

to young working girls.

You know, these are girls that had their first pay packets,

they were the first girls to have jobs and a career.

It was the first time women could plan and have their own careers.

If you stay on in the service,

it offers a career which can lead to the very top.

Therefore the first time they had their own money

and made their own choices. I think a revolution was going on

which fashion people hadn't realised.

I think the change of focus had gone

from the rich, international couture thing

to the young working girl herself. She was going to set the pace

in fashion and decide what was right and what was wrong.

She knew who she was aiming at.

Mary herself said that it was her customers going into Bazaar

that really the miniskirt evolved from.

I think she started the miniskirt, didn't she?

That is the number one question. She started the miniskirt.

Did Mary Quant invent the miniskirt?

Something that people will discuss forever.

Didn't she? Didn't she? Didn't she?

Is the mini truly yours?

Oh, yes, because the Chelsea girl, she had the best legs in the world.

She wanted the short skirts.

So, scandal...She wore it, she had the courage to wear it. My God.

I know that the French guy reckoned it was him.

In 1961,

this new designer, Andre Courreges,

showed this couture collection in Paris, with skirts

one or two inches above the knee.

She called it...

..the miniskirt...

..because she loved the Mini car

and she thought it was a wonderful thing.

They called it the miniskirt, but really, at that point,

it was just a skirt above the knee.

I mean, even the Queen was wearing a skirt above the knee.

Mary was the one that got them shorter and shorter.

The girls that came in to buy it would say,

"I want my skirt length shorter, shorter..."

Shorter. Shorter!

The London girl was rolling it up an inch shorter.

Then I'd go an inch shorter and then, you know, it just...

..it was the opposite.

You know, you looked around and your friends' skirts were shorter

and you said, "Mum, will you shorten my dress for me?"

You didn't shorten it by an inch cos that didn't mean anything.

So you shortened it by three inches.

And then, once tights were available for everybody,

you could have it as short as you wanted, so they got shortened again.

So they ended up like six inches, eight inches above the knee.

I thought the idea of the miniskirt was designed by a guy

because, you know, you'd go in the back of a pub

or beer club...

The miniskirt was perfect for that.

The whole 1960s was one massive party.

Party.

Which was super-lovely.

Women may now be irreversibly emancipated.

And if that is so, we're entering a quite different kind of society.

Literally, for thousands and thousands of years,

women have had to worry about

whether sex was going to make them pregnant.

And suddenly, for the first time in history,

you could have sex and you didn't have to worry.

And I think this freedom went to everybody's heads.

With the '60s, there wasn't guilt.

It was about...living in your body and enjoying things.

Whether it's to be attractive

or whether it's to be happy with being yourself

and confident with being yourself, or both or all these things,

clothes can very much help you play these roles.

Wear these clothes, be the kind of woman that you want to be.

For kids today, you know, in the 21st century,

that's a sort of given, but back in the '50s and '60s,

her clothes gave permission for women to be the person

that they wanted to be.

What she did was liberate those girls. She gave them life.

She gave them a context.

I can see very easily, looking back, the clothes are marvellous

and they demonstrate so sometimes absurdly

the exuberance of the mood then.

The kind of wow, look at me, I'm free, I'm female, I'm alive,

and isn't it smashing to be female?

The miniskirt was just so much fun.

And it epitomised the fun and the frivolity

of the 1960s in the King's Road.

Like so many things in fashion,

I don't think one person often really designs a particular trend.

It's an emergence.

Who turned the miniskirt into a worldwide phenomenon?

And without a doubt, it was Mary Quant.

But, Mary, isn't the miniskirt rather obvious,

simply blaringly enticing?

After all, it seems that few girls actually have the legs, hips

and above all the panache to carry it off majestically?

But who wants to be majestic?

People either loved what I was doing or hated it.

Many times, there'd be people in the street who'd go...ah!

Old gentlemen used to come in and really shake their umbrellas at me.

Oh, I can't say that I particularly approve of some of the styles.

And shout, "Obscene! Disgusting! Degenerate!" You know.

They couldn't explain why it was obscene or degenerate

except that to them, to certain people, it was.

The youth at the time was a lot about...

..wearing something that old people didn't like.

You'd think, it must be good.

It was a time of experimentation.

Like with drugs and fashion and especially music.

The Beatles, they sounded like an R

love and girls and that sort of teenage stuff.

The Stones were rebellious,

popular because they were confident and arrogant and glamorous.

Both bands changed the way that we looked at ourselves.

They changed the way we dressed.

I often talk about The Who being onstage looking at their audience,

copying what people in the audience were wearing.

So, the following week, we would be wearing

what the people in the audience were wearing the week before.

We would get the credit for the fashion change.

Mary Quant was quite conscious

of the fact that she was at the heart of a youthquake.

She knew, by the time we get to the '60s,

that what was happening around her

reflected what she was doing in fashion.

Mary Quant's first show that I ever saw,

the models came kind of dancing in

and they were full of life and it was just elevating.

And I think we all wanted to stand up and cheer.

Alexander understood presentation. He understood this thing

of sexy young girls doing fun shows and with music.

He would put all that together.

When you did her show, she didn't want

everybody just mincing down the catwalk exactly the same.

She wanted the personality

of each individual girl to show her outfit.

The models all had the new Vidal Sassoon short, swinging hair,

as Mary herself had.

More than 60 outfits from the Quant collection presented in a manner

that leaves the spectators, and the models, breathless.

(ANIMATED CHATTER)

Paul, it's Miranda.

(ALL CHATTING AT ONCE)

I'm not really concerned with the design,

in the way Mary and her gang are,

and I wouldn't attempt to interfere in what the design should be, ever.

But I am of course concerned in the business

of bringing this thing to the attention of the public.

Darling!Hello.

Plunket Greene was the wind beneath her wings and sheltered her

and enabled her to get on with all the creative side of things.

And also, I think he gave her some confidence

to go out into the wide world.

She and Alexander and some business people

decided that they'd take a few models to New York

and show off Mary's collection of clothes

and introduce her, basically, to America.

And I think, at that time,

America was very behind England in the fashion way.

When we came downstairs for breakfast wearing our trouser suits,

our Mary Quant trouser suits, feeling cool, you know, walking in,

and they wouldn't let us in cos we were wearing trousers.

You would go into a hotel, you'd get in a lift,

and then people would say, "Oh, where did you get that haircut?"

And what about this and what about that?

They all wanted to know and be part of this whole new look.

She went to New York,

not with great aspirations to become

a kind of multi-global fashion entity,

but it happened almost by mistake

because what she was doing connected with the zeitgeist.

And I think it was Women's Wear Daily that saw her collection

and just went crazy for it and went, you know, this is it,

this is what we want to be wearing,

this is what the girls of America want to be wearing.

They were absolutely mad for Mary Quant

and would sort of look at her in a rather different way

because she was so swinging London.

And it's a certain Britishness that the world needed at the time.

America was so obsessed with the British invasion.

'The cries of the crowd roar with pitch and volume...'

when The Beatles entered New York,

there was literally... there was pandemonium.

'3,000 screaming teenagers arrived at New York's Kennedy Airport

'to greet, you guessed it, The Beatles.

'This rock and roll group has taken over

'as the kingpins of musical appreciation among the young...'

It was quite extraordinary to see it and slightly terrifying as well

because they were going completely mad.

You know, and, oh, my God, they're screaming at my boyfriend.

This is great.

If The Beatles provided the soundtrack,

Mary certainly provided all the visual images.

And she was right at the centre,

giving to the world something that is so British.

And then was the beginning of the Union Jack

and Carnaby Street.

I think it just caught people's imagination

and drew people to this country.

It did really start with Mary

and it really put this country on the map.

'Clothes by Quant are building a reputation in the States as well.'

Very quickly, particularly people like JCPenney,

realised that Mary could add so much to their sportswear,

dresswear, separates collections,

and it seemed, within a remarkably short space of time,

she was producing

four, six, eight collections a year for them.

So many things are different

because you know very well, they've got to translate

the different fabrics and so on, so you can work from drawings a lot,

but you must be in touch with the sales people

so everyone knows what's going on.

I think, you know, I think it can be terribly exciting, I really do.

Well, it'd be great. Obviously it'd take a lot of energy,

but I'd love to do it, really. It's not a question

whether you'd love to do it, you've bloody well got to do it now.

They were going to meet the head of JCPenney,

and they were really excited about it,

and they're on their way to Washington.

So they're all nice and relaxed,

they're having champagne and caviar in first class.

About five minutes before they come in to land...

..a crew member comes out and they say,

"We just wanted to say that you'll be getting off the plane first

"because they've arranged for a camera crew

"press and photographers to be at the airport."

Well, Mary was like...

And she went into a panic.

She got up to go to the loo, she wouldn't come out of the loo.

Knocking on the door, "Come out." She said, "No, I can't, I can't."

(KNOCKING)

So they let everybody get off the plane

and Mary's looking out of the window

and she can see this barrage of photographers and a film crew

and in the end, the press and everybody left

and then she just scurried out and held a bag near her face.

(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING)

Will you stay back?

Actually hates sort of being photographed.

She dreads it more than hates it when it happens.

As you've probably observed, she's tremendously shy.

She's frightfully good at it in a way. She looks like herself,

exactly like what Mary Quant ought to look like.

And wears her own clothes rather well. she Has sleepless nights

before being interviewed by somebody or being photographed.

I'm sure the working relationship between Mary and Plunket

was the strength of the whole thing.

Because she was very shy, she needed a big personality

to sometimes hide behind.

And without him, I don't think she could have taken on

the role of being the front of the brand.

I don't think she could have done it without him.

He was always there at Mary's side.

And quite often, he would kind of

take the first question and start it off,

then, when you could see that she was ready to go and she chipped in,

he'd kind of fade into the background a bit and let her talk.

And once she got going, she was fine.

She's a diffident person.

Some people say she's shy, but I think she's more, you know...

..reserved than shy.

She had her husband who was a brilliant impresario,

entrepreneur, great at the smooth talking, great at the PR.

It was fantastic. 4,000 kids turned up, had to get the fire department

cos they thought the floor would collapse, then me and the girls

had to have police protection to get us to the hotel.

The Beatles had been a week before, the place was so mad about England.

Never seen anything like it.

You know, my father brought an energy,

but also was incredibly innovative in terms of marketing and PR.

And Alexander was also very good at speaking to the press.

My father encouraged Alexander to go and take journalists out to lunch

because he could see that he just had a very good way with people.

Alexander, you know, he did like to smoke

and he certainly liked to drink,

so I think that the living was kind of quite 24/7.

I would say, right, who'd like tea, who'd like coffee?

And Alexander would say.

"Sarah, forget the tea and coffee,

"we're just going to have gin and tonic."

And Mary would say, "No, coffee."

And we're talking 10 o'clock in the morning here.

And Alexander would say, "OK. No, just gin and tonics."

Mary was always trying to keep him a bit healthier.

But he was a fun, big character.

One of the big things that made

everybody think of Mary Quant forever was that Alexander said

that he'd cut her pubic hair into a heart shape.

Well, this was completely shocking

cos nobody ever talked about pubic hair, ever.

So that definitely made an impact.

Everybody wanted to know

who was this man and who was this woman.

He got tremendous coverage.

I mean, the column inches he achieved on behalf of Bazaar,

it would have cost a fortune to buy that sort of space.

You said that you recognised that, in part at least,

the phenomenal growth of the idea

of the King's Road the Chelsea Set and so forth.

Then, from the publicity given to it,

and the way in which writers wrote it up in magazines.

Fashion editors, they're always out there in the world,

they're always seeing what's new, what's hot.

And yeah, if a designer really catches the fashion editor's eye,

anything is possible, really.

So the revolution that was taking place in fashion

was also taking place in fashion journalism.

So, in the way that

new, young designers were making clothes that young people liked,

there were new, young fashion editors

and there was a wealth of new, young magazines.

We had British Vogue, Queen,

so there were a few essential magazines.

And the fashion editors were really powerful.

You chose this girl because she could waterski

and there isn't a single one of her waterskiing.

The sort of girls we want to see photographed in our clothes

look as real as possible and alive as possible.

And then combine that with photographers like Bailey...

And there was this kind of bunch of poshies

running around creating fashion

but it was about to be broken in half

because of course Bailey, David Bailey,

he brought this kind of grittiness.

And he was just magnificent, a maverick.

And Mary adored Terry Donovan.

Adored him. And he was an incredibly good photographer,

both technically, but just the way he worked with people

and the confidence and the love and the fun.

And then let's not forget the models.

I mean, the '60s to me was essentially about models.

There had never been anything like her in the history of the world.

You know, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton,

you know, all these incredible English girls.

They had a lot of personality

and I think that was contagious

and people wanted to feel that energy.

I have been compared to Twiggy, when I was younger.

And when I was younger, I met her, and, um, she's so lovely

and she kind of took me under her wing a bit.

Jean Shrimpton gave me tips on men.

(LAUGHING)

What did she say?I can't say.

(LAUGHING)

It was a time when black models

were not exactly used in magazines or shows.

You'd see a hand or feet or, you know, someone's back.

Mary literally put these models out there.

She proposed a new idea of beauty.

Mary and Alexander were very much... very much artists.

But what they lacked was, really, a great understanding of business

and the reality of it.

I had a running battle with Mary

about the amount of cloth she bought for her designs.

I mean, huge amount in relation to the turnover of the business.

And it was due to the lack of discipline

and converting the cloth into clothes,

we were losing a lot of money.

I think what he saw is that Mary Quant could be marketed as a brand

and they could do very well with licensing the brand

and also licensing designs.

Archie's concept of introducing licensing

meant that Mary would be producing designs for manufacturers,

like Steinberg's, who produced

her Ginger Group ready-to-wear collection.

But then they would come up with the manufacture.

Archie was very much the man who pushed the licensing,

I think initially against Mary's wishes.

Licensing allows you to extend your brand

to new markets, new areas, new categories,

which can be really exciting for a brand,

but it's about control and it's about a sense of understanding

between the licensee and the licensor.

That's where you've got to get it right.

She basically believed she could do it all.

And I think probably, deep down,

there was a resentment of anybody trying to help her.

Tell me about the pockets.Well, you know, you'd like to get rid

of those pockets altogether. I think it makes the whole thing.

It'll save them tenpence, but so, it makes the dress.

You have to give a little bit in order to gain.

And sometimes that's not easy.

If you're used to controlling your business 100% creatively,

then that's going to be very hard and a struggle.

Nothing went out without her final say-so.

But it opened up the opportunity for her to move into all sorts

of different accessories.

It made me interested in underwear immediately

because I wanted to make a form of underwear

which was very much showing the body.

She was the first person to go into all the accoutrements of a girl.

You know, um... specifically into make-up,

which I think is one of the... the big things that she did.

I...I got involved with the make-up bit because, um...

..now that the clothes were different, the face was wrong.

She was like, we've revolutionised the way people wore fashion,

the face then didn't match,

and the face didn't match because coming out of the 1950s,

it was red lips and it was sort of blue eye shadow, and she just said,

I'm sorry, but with the kind of bold colour palette I'm now using,

the face just doesn't match.

And so then she decided to take on cosmetics.

Right, who's got an eyebrow pencil?

Model girls, top model girls like Jean Shrimpton,

my friends, we'd be doing shows together

and the way they approached make-up was something quite else.

Buying certain sorts of theatrical make-up and using a technique

which was part colour and part sculpting and illusion.

She kind of watched women sort of taking crayons,

you know, using pencils to draw on freckles,

putting foundation on their lips to create this new look

of this very kind of babydoll aesthetic.

She sort of took that and bottled it.

'Designer Mary Quant is just one of the great generation

'who has dreamed up a revolutionary approach to young cosmetics,

'which even department stores like Selfridges have taken up.'

She did this thing called Loads of Lash,

and it was a strip of eyelashes, like in a long strip,

and you could just cut off what you wanted.

And that's how she was. She kind of, like...copped on to things,

she was alert, she saw ideas.

I'm so messy, I can never find the right brush and right bit.

So I wanted a box where everything's in the same box.

Packaging was part of selling that dream.

Coming up with the paintbox idea, it was revolutionary at the time,

to actually her thinking about how do I put on make-up?

I've got everything in different places, I make a mess,

I'm going to put it all in one plastic box.

You lifted the lid and there was eye shadow

and blusher and lipstick, all in one, with a mirror.

Honestly, to this day, it makes me excited thinking of that

because that was unheard of, it was so new and different,

and Mary's make-up was just... Oh, you had to have that.

Oh, made of plastic, I love plastic.

Rather than me apologising and pretending it's gold, you know,

it's, um...it's, you know, 100 carat good plastic.

Did you find that what you were demanding and wanting as a designer

was being matched by the capacity of technology to manufacture it?

Yes, I mean, sometimes I think new ideas come from technology

and sometimes the other way round.

Really, it's how I got into this shoe thing.

Because I'd never had a pair of comfy shoes in my life

and I wanted to make shoes that were like, er, glass or bottles,

and had no seams and no bits that rub and all that.

You just pour a kind of chewing gum into a mould

and you get out what you want.

And rather like making jelly.

And so this is how we started making these shoes.

And already it's like a Cinderella thing you have,

walking on air or walking on a glass slipper.

I think one of her greatest innovations was not her own,

it was actually her ability to get manufacturers to innovate,

to actually get manufacturers to go outside their comfort zone.

I know when she did the wet collection, that was an eye-opener

because it was so incredibly different.

I'd never seen PVC in clothes before,

except for a yellow slicker in Grimsby docks,

for example, for the fishermen.

Now came the award.

A proud moment, surely, for Mary Quant.

Honoured by winning the award for Britain.

Her business actually was a dream business

from the point of view of a fashion designer.

So many fashion designers had only been able to turn their ideas

and creations into business if they've had a good business partner.

I was ambitious,

I think in a way that neither Alexander nor Mary were,

and I was determined to develop the business

as best it could be doable.

If we could keep making a success of what we were doing,

but I wanted to expand.

You've got Archie realises that...

..what Mary is...

..brilliant for

is that, actually,

she's a pen on a piece of paper.

And those drawings...

..can be sent around the world

and turned into hard cash.

(FOREIGN LANGUAGES INTERMINGLING)

She was international. Everyone in Europe knew about her.

She was big in America.

Last year's American sales alone topped $2 million.

Apparently she's big in Australia as well.

Mary Quant comes to Australia.

This was the great power of Mary Quant, it was the export.

The thing that was growing at that time was the cosmetics.

And that was becoming a big business.

By 1970, Quant Cosmetics was ginormous.

It seemed the whole world was clamouring for

Mary's make-up and clothes.

We've got agendas coming in from Finland.

We've got the fittings at Ginger Group in the morning,

meeting in the afternoon. I'd like to talk to you about

this USA and Canadian trip. We've got fabric people coming in.

Wednesday, you're in Manchester all day

to make this commercial radio tape. Which can you get me out of?

I thought we didn't need the shops.

So the only real row I ever had with Mary

was when I said I was going to sell the shops.

She was furious and I said, well, you'll be able to design

anything you like, you won't be tied to clothes.

She was really one of the first brands to go into licensing

in a very, very big way.

It was quite fresh territory,

and she didn't know where it was going to go.

What happened was that, from being a successful design brand,

they went insane.

Mary Quant Ltd, one of the most

astonishing success stories in the world of fashion.

Licensing manufacturers on five continents.

It was frenetic, absolutely frenetic.

We couldn't make it fast enough.

There are thousands of people

working for manufacturers we design for

who are dependent on Mary jolly well coming up with the goods.

And if she doesn't do it,

she is letting down people and endangering their jobs.

The pressure wasn't so much on Alexander and Archie,

it was all about Mary,

and, you know, if you're Mary, that's hard.

I'm sure the demands on her were just we want more and more,

and until you put boundaries down,

I suppose, you know, it becomes boundary-less.

Everybody is looking to you for what's next.

Everybody's looking to you for the next big thing.

Everybody is looking to you to maintain the machine

that has been built up on your back.

It's just too difficult to maintain that, day in, day out.

If you think about it, Twiggy only worked for four years.

She, you know, Twiggy was only a model for four years.

Um...and The Beatles disbanded in, I think, 1968.

Do you know?

But Mary had to keep on going.

I think fashion's a pendulum.

So it can only go so far

and it's going to move, there's going to be a reaction to it.

And I think Quant in the early '60s was about the future,

they were optimistic and it was Pop.

And then, I think, by the late '60s, there was a disillusionment

and the new generation didn't want that.

So they became hippies, it was bohemianism.

It all went into the flower power thing

and floaty dresses and flared, faded jeans.

They looked at vintage fashion,

they looked at recycling, upcycling,

they were wearing ethnic clothes,

so that modernism, the futurism Mary Quant had brought to fashion

was no longer in style.

London, physically,

was an enormously different town

from the '60s during the '70s.

'From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14% or so less...'

'Indications claimed this afternoon of higher prices...'

It had actually gone slower, it had gone dark,

it had become almost wetter.

The governments were having problems,

it was just not the same kind of place.

The Beatles, of course, tragically split up in '69, far too early.

We hadn't even begun to hear what they had to say.

And they were gone. And so, things had changed.

Things had come to an end

and people pined for the country.

I think they watched McCartney sitting on his farm in Scotland

with Linda, and everyone had a similar idea.

I'll never forget the video footage of them having a row

over clay pigeon shooting.

I got it!

I got it.I got it!

Darling, it was falling down dead by the time you were even there.

You missed it.Christ!

I guess you could say they embraced countryside life.

I absolutely love...

..cows. (MOOING)

They're the most fascinating, gentle and beautiful animals.

(MOOING)

Ten live in the fields near my house. I love to talk to them.

And they talk to me.

(MOOING)

There's not many things in life better than falling asleep

in a sunny field and being licked on the face and woken

by a glorious, inquisitive...

..cow.

Mary had the best of both worlds

in that she had the town pad in Alexander Square

and she also had this lovely country house

where she still lives.

You know, the thing is as well,

that Mary very much wanted to have a baby.

Very, very much wanted to have a baby

and they tried for a very long time

before finally Orlando came along.

And I mean, I think that was Mary's personal dream come true.

Here I go.

It's bedtime.

And he announces then, the trees are red and the grass is blue...

She always had a fantastic relationship with Orlando.

(ORLANDO GIGGLING)

And he with her.

And I think he fills a big gap for her.

Privacy to me is all important.

My relationship with Orlando,

though I don't want to hide him away because I'm so proud of him.

I don't know, I think I was always aware that things were different.

I was very aware that home was a private place for her.

There was a slight atmosphere of, um, sort of bomb shelter.

It was kind of where we went to hide,

which I think is inevitable

when you've got paparazzi at the end of the drive.

(SHOUTING)

What's Orlando...? Orlando, hey.

We would go down and see them for lunch or to stay, um, quite often.

It was quite sort of Sunday lunchy.

Um, quite, um...conventional.

(ALL CHATTERING)

In the early '70s, there were obviously still suspicions

that women couldn't work or have a full-time job or a full-time career

and juggle a family as well.

But she knew she could and she did.

And she did it hugely successfully.

Everyone thinks that in the perfume industry

there's lots of women around, women perfumers,

I was one of the first female perfumers in those times

and what was that, 30 years ago? And it was quite intimidating, really,

and I can see that it would be very intimidating for a fashion designer

who's then, you know, talking to people about an industry

that she doesn't even know so much about.

What do you think people want out of a perfume?

It seems to me that, inevitably,

to be a woman now is a very schizophrenic sort of situation.

Because on the one hand one has asked the chance and in fact is very ambitious.

At the same time one wants flattery and prettiness.

And I think it's this...This duality in women now is the thing.

This perverse schizophrenia...Yes.

..is...is the mood that I would like to...to arrive at.

Yes, I would agree entirely.

But I think that...

..to satisfy that...

..you have to come up with two types of perfume.

One which... But it's the same woman.

She was a very strong woman... in a man's era.

And she taught me a lot about how to handle men in that time.

I think you have a point, but the modern woman, it's very perverse,

she would then use the so-called evening one in the daytime.

She would come up with some idea or the other, and you'd think,

really?

So can we not get both these...

If, like, the guys from ICI,

or whoever made various products, would say,

"Oh, we can't do that, that's not possible."

Oh, no, I don't think so, that's totally invalid.

Oh, I know you'll be able to find a way.

I-I don't see...you know, I...

I think this is the modern woman, she's both at the same time.

And she just sat there.

Well, yes, well, we'll work hard at it, but, um...

..it's...very difficult, what you ask for.

Um...

She smiled at them and didn't say anything, and I'm thinking,

gosh, this is getting embarrassing.

OK, we'll see what we can do.

She got...she got what she wanted.

She would insist, and of course they did.

In the end, she always got what she wanted.

You can't change Mary's mind.

And after working with her for a little while,

you began to realise that she was right.

Oh, that's just dirty.

(BOTH LAUGHING)

To me, your clothes seem seem much more classical

than they were in the '60s. How would you describe them?

I certainly feel the mood for very classical clothes,

but modern classics, you know, with a...

..touch of lunacy.

I'm not deliberately so provocative

as the mood was earlier.

The thing that fascinates me about fashion is it's all about change.

As usual, fashions anticipated a general attitude

in economic problems and all sorts of things,

and fashion has become, in the last two or three years, very classical.

The aggressive look of the '60s was natural to the time.

But right now, nobody wants that,

nobody wants the drama of wars and so on,

and so they leap at nostalgia

and this element... going through everything.

The latest collection, hot off the cutting room floor,

of one of Britain's leading fashion designers,

Mary Quant is world famous.

With creations like these, we're not surprised.

Fashion's always about change.

And I'm designing into the future.

Yes, that does bring me to a rougher question,

and you almost answered it in the sense that,

is yesterday's revolutionary today's establishment figure?

Is that you?

Well, it obviously isn't.

I think, you know, it is hard to...

..keep up and keep up, you know, the zeitgeist changes.

The world seemed to be full of middle-class hippies,

sort of wearing flares and shuffling up and down the high street.

Young people suddenly found the sound and looks

that they could relate to, and in a way, knew the mood of their Britain.

They were a sort of social revolution

cos they didn't seem to care about money or fame or success.

How far would you say that, for instance,

punk fashions were a product of the kids themselves,

and the designers caught on to it afterwards?

They were a product of the kids themselves, absolutely.

It was a reaction against, you know, manufacturing,

and the desire to be individual.

Vivienne Westwood, fuck!

You know, what an extraordinary creature.

What an extraordinary designer.

What an extraordinarily powerful and charismatic woman.

The King's Road really burst into life.

I think Vivienne Westwood and some of her cohorts

had two or three shops.

When you look at Vivienne Westwood,

there is that parallel with Mary Quant.

Both pioneering new ground.

People like Mary Quant made it possible for us to proceed.

They set this canvas up for us to jump into and then we ran with it.

Oh, don't ask me about King's Road cos I hate it.

I'm a doll maniac.

Being asked to work on a doll and design the clothes

was absolutely irresistible to me cos I really love them.

If I can get it done, anybody can.

Are the glasses straight,

because I've got odd ears making me crooked?

Are they straight?Yes, they're straight.Right.Everybody quiet.

I'm an illustrator and I dealt with the packaging.

This resulted, with the famous logo, which I did first of all.

She was a happy-go-lucky character.

Very into adventure.

And they all had names.

It was a policy of the firm with everything was named.

Even the horse. (NEIGHING)

I know it gave Cindy a terrible fright.

Or Barbie, number two.

And then, of course, I had the piece de resistance,

her underwear.

These were the little panties.

Did you want me to put them on a doll? You can hardly see them.

You can see why they never reached production.

I like to make joyous and happy things.

But sadly, it always ends too quickly.

The future and the fashion pages are for the beautiful.

And the young, really.

And I suppose...it always will be.

Hm.

I was 35, and I knew that Mary was five years older than me

and I thought, wow, that means Mary Quant is going to be 40!

The queen of youth is going to be 40.

So that's what I'll do, I'll do an interview with Mary about being 40.

And to my amazement, she said she wouldn't do it.

And I begged her. I remember sending her a bunch of flowers.

I remember ringing her up about ten times.

And she absolutely wouldn't do the interview.

I had thought of myself as a friend of hers, so I was quite upset.

And in fact, I remained slightly upset in the back of my mind,

um, for years.

And then I was talking to somebody who'd worked closely with her

and I told her the story, and she said,

oh, well, what you don't know is that Mary always lied about her age,

because she was older her husband.

So she pretended she was five years younger than she was.

So when you wanted to write about her turning 40,

she was actually turning 45

and she didn't want to have to reveal that to anybody. (LAUGHING)

She continued to design garments

and that went on right through into the '80s.

# SPANDAU BALLET: True

I think that the brutal practicalities of being a designer

is that you do need to sustain your creativity with money,

and so, licensing, for example,

is one way of doing that.

And if you can do that with a certain sense of credibility,

there's nothing wrong with it.

In fact, fashion came into the house.

We didn't want to go out, as before.

But now you're into so many product areas,

how do you manage to keep the Quant image intact?

When it's to do with duvets and carpets and roller blinds

and things that people don't think of, in terms of Quant.

Many designers took to licensing at this time,

and Mary Quant, perhaps by modern standards, took it quite a long way,

with her name being plastered over a huge variety of products.

Not only furnishings, but things like carpets, wallpapers,

paints, and kitchenware and so on.

Today, when we look back at it through modern marketing eyes,

we would probably argue that it was pushed too far.

Mary, what was your experience? I mean, here you are,

you've got a massive business network now.

130 shops in Japan?Yes.

Clearly, there's not that great a gulf of understanding

in terms of appreciation of your design.

I think, from a fashion point of view

and from a design point of view,

there's a very, very strong bond.

The way Mary looked, really cottoned on,

the Japanese girls identified with Mary very well

and they loved her.

All roads led, basically, to Japan in the make-up leg of her business,

which has obviously been, as you say, licensed to the hilt.

What have the Japanese taught you about selling?

Oh, so much.

Um, that shopping should be fun.

The Japanese wanted to include all sorts of other products,

fashion accessories and things.

And gradually won Mary over

from her stance of saying nobody can do it but her.

And so that they were more and more able to produce their own range

and present it to Mary for her endorsement.

Japanese people are so wonderful to work with.

I've learnt so much. I think we can all achieve so much together.

I was finding my work difficult

because I'd go and chair a meeting of some subsidiary company

and I began to think that I didn't really understand

what they were saying.

So I made the decision to retire, which...

I was very sad, but in the best interests of everybody,

I shouldn't be there.

The next morning, I thought, well, yesterday I employed 750 people,

now I just employ one.

When your father passed away, he was quite young.

Yeah.Was he in his fifties?

Yeah.Um, could you tell me if it was a sudden thing?

Er...

..well, yes, it was relatively.

Um...but, um...

..I don't think...

If you smoke 60 Gitanes a day and like a glass of wine,

you're not going to last forever.

Well, it's just terribly sad that he had to go so early on.

He was...just a...

..a great shaft of colour and sunshine

which went out of everyone's lives.

They both sparked off each other.

They were...they were such good friends,

as well as obviously lovers,

and he was her rock and it must have been really hard for her

because she must have lost part of herself when he died.

When Alexander was alive, she...she stood behind him.

So Alexander was the front,

Alexander was the one that did all that showman stuff,

and she didn't have to do that.

I think then, when he died,

she had to... she had to rethink...

..who she was and how she related...to people.

I think, er, losing my father was probably, um...

..difficult for her to keep passionate.

But she's a very proud woman as well,

so she certainly kept going.

Because it's, you know,

it's so much part of her DNA

and is what she adores.

Years later, I mean long after I'd retired,

Mary asked me to come over and have lunch with her.

She had something to discuss

and she said, you'll be proud of me,

I've done the most tremendous deal with the Japanese

that meant that it was over to them.

And that was the end of...

I think that was really the end of Quant, as we'd known it anyway.

All good things come to an end.

You can't continue with that energy and that vigour.

At a certain point, you have to let go.

To actually see someone who's so brilliant, such an innovator,

had such an effect on the world, in the way that she did,

and to then not really have that control

of her business side of things...

..I think it must be quite difficult for her.

Well, that is sad, but life is cruel sometimes.

Well, it's very competitive.

If you want your brand to have longevity,

if you want your brand to exist once you're gone, which I think,

you know, if somebody's spent a lifetime working

to create what they've created, to then,

when you aren't around any more, for that to disappear would be very sad.

It's just the way the cycle of fashion exists.

She handed over the reins

to somebody who could kind of move her brand on.

Do you think her legacy has lived on?

I mean, the fact that Mary Quant doesn't exist now

as a major fashion brand,

um, I think in some respects is neither here nor there.

Um, because when you look at her history,

it resonates and has got threads through

to the things that designers still do today.

As a young fashion designer,

how do you see things changing and going forward?

Maybe we need to learn we don't need so much.

Exactly. I think...

..we lost the plot a bit.

You know, all this fast fashion,

and then we fed the machine and we got too greedy.

What's wrong with high street, it's just completely a rip-off

because, um, all those things

are made with really cheap labour

and they're just going to landfill and there's no choice at all.

And I'm trying to do something about fashion.

I'm going to try to have "buy less, choose well and make it last."

And that idea has gone everywhere.

Fashion in the 2020s is in a crisis moment.

But then so is the whole consumer economy

that we all live and operate within.

I mean, we can't carry on the way we were.

We can't carry on with... It was just too many seasons,

too many clothes, too many things we didn't need.

I did an issue with Taylor Swift on the cover in an old Chanel jacket,

and the line was "Buy better, buy less."

Mass-market production now, what's the future for it?

Is there a future for it? You know, really, now is the time

for us to think about going back to the little boutique.

We don't want to be mass producing clothes any more,

we don't want to use plastic as much, we've got to think of new ways

to get young people being creative.

I think there's a real interest

not wearing something that's mass produced,

but wearing something that's individual

and wearing something that perhaps you've made yourself.

And I think, from Quant's very early designs, it was about...

..self-expression, she wanted to make something that represented

her life and the life of her friends.

And I think that is the key message from Quant.

Mary's legacy

was the inner confidence

that she engendered in young people

to experiment, to have fun.

Exploring, finding out, being inquisitive,

trying things out.

To add their own identity to things.

Mary really was at the beginning of all that.

London Fashion Week, season four, autumn-winter 2020,

Mark Fast was showing on the final morning,

and the headlines were all about

Mark Fast miniskirts, coloured tights.

Directly inspired, of course, by Mary Quant,

as he fully acknowledged.

I think a lot of designers don't recognise perhaps

they're drawing on Mary Quant's influence.

I think she influenced everybody,

from Calvin Klein to...

..Marc Jacobs

or Anna Sui.

It's still current.

Her ideas just keep on going forever.

I think that she needs to be remembered by everybody

because of all the things she's done in her life.

The winner of the British Fashion Industry's

special hall of fame award for lifetime achievement is Mary Quant.

Internationally, she is the most well known British designer.

I think we still equate her name as synonymous with the miniskirt.

Mary Quant is without a doubt

one of the most important British designers ever.

That "Free yourself, be yourself,"

amazing quotes that she gave the world,

and ultimately, gave everyone enough courage

to free themselves of the shackles of certain clothing.

Yeah, it was interesting seeing that show.

I think I got about halfway round before I was in tears.

And I think it took a good three or four visits

before I could actually do the whole thing without, um, welling up.

I've always loved her quote

that she didn't have time to wait for women's lib.

She wasn't out to change the world,

she just wanted to do what she wanted to do

and wasn't about to be told that she couldn't.

Fashion's for now. Not for...necessarily teenagers,

not for necessarily being 20 and 30 and old and dead and...

Fashion is the now.

If you're still enjoying living, and you're still enjoying being a woman,

and being sexy and all that, then, you know,

one wants surely to wear the clothes of today.

There's nothing to do with... age or anything else,

it seems to me.

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