Life then had been rationed, begrudged; almost the only place where the young could create their own excitement was at art college, with the Chelsea Arts Ball an annual chance for frivolity. At that ball a teenaged Quant, clad chiefly in balloons, hooked up with a fellow Goldsmiths’ College student, Alexander Plunket Greene, who swanned around long-haired in his mother’s silk pyjama top, trumpet in one hand and film script in the other.“Life...
By the late 1950s Quant had synthesised her Chelsea girl look from elements of Left Bank kooky beatnik and practical details of American sportswear, plus her preference for vulgarity over good taste He came from a family said to be Evelyn Waugh’s model for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited and was at art college crossing social classes. Born in Blackheath, southeast London, she had been persuaded by her parents, Jack and Mildred, both schoolteachers, to study art rather than fashion on leaving school.
An image from 1972 of Mary Quant with her hair stylist Vidal Sassoon, centre, and TV presenter Michael Parkinson. They are all wearing Quant neckware designs. Photograph: PAPlunket’s poverty ended on his 21st birthday when he inherited £5,000. He wanted to open a nightclub but could not get an alcohol licence, so opened a restaurant, and Quant set up Bazaar on the ground floor.
Mary Quant cosmetics arrived in 1966 and were more original than her clothes. It dwindled away in the 1970s but was revived under licence in Japan in 1984, and re-exported to the West in the 1990s. Japan was Quant’s most logical market, for young women there have cultural sanction to present themselves as prepubescent – pretending to be very young is seen as liberating, which appealed to Quant, who said: “I grew up not wanting to grow up.