- I think the point of fashion is not to get bored when looking at somebody.

I think to the point of clothes for women should 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.

(jazz music) - [Derry Curry] Mary somehow knew what a girl in the street wanted.

- [Mary Quant] The mini skirt.

- She just picked up what was in their subconscious.

- We wanted to dance to the Beatles.

We wanted to wear mini skirts.

- We don'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 old people didn't like.

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

- [Kate Moss] English fashion has always been notoriously rebellious.

- She was an innovator.

She was a rule breaker.

She empowered 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.

- [Man] It was a really rich period of change.

And fashion was a huge part of this.

- If I designer really catches the fashion editors eyes, 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.

- [Mary Quant] I think in a funny way I must've anticipated what people wanted.

- [Interviewer] Was this just chance do you think?

- [Mary Quant] Absolute chance, absolute luck.

I mean... I think luck really is timing.

(Pretty Flamingo by Manfred Mann playing) ♪ On our block all of the guys call her flamingo ♪ ♪ Cause 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 neighborhood ♪ Oh every guy would make her his if he just could ♪ ♪ If she just would (plane roaring) (explosion) - [Mary Quant] I really think in a way it goes back to the war.

It was an extraordinary reaction at the end of the war when we'd run a war and lost so much at the same time.

So there was a new generation that came romping through with huge confidence and high spirit.

And the generation that should have been there, controlling everything, just let us do it.

(jazz music) - [Interviewer] You were brought up in Wales, in Pembrokeshire.

What sort of childhood did you have?

- [Mary Quant] Oh blissful, because I loved Pembrokeshire.

My brother more or less ran wild, you know, with the cliffs and studying of birds and scrambling.

We'd take off the morning and just... - [Interviewer] That doesn't sound like the daughter of Welsh Baptist school teachers somehow.

- [Mary Quant] Well, a war was on, you know, we were being shunted from one school to another.

We managed to escape school for, 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 crickets and hanging out with her brother Tony and having a, just having a good time.

Sort of quite tomboyish existence almost.

And I think maybe that period of relative freedom really stayed with her.

- [Mary Quant] I was the usual split personality as a child.

One minute climbing trees and wanted to play the boys and throw stones and steal the apples and all the rest of it.

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

- [Interviewer] Most girls are guided in their dress sense by their mothers.

How were you dressed when you were a child?

- [Mary Quant] A cousin was a very good little girl never wore her clothes out.

And they were completely right for her.

I knew they were wrong for me, I had to square face and I was a tough stumpy... I would say 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 age on.

I used to start doing things to my school uniform, hitching it up to be more daring.

I liked my skirt 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 the children were much more beautiful.

And I want you to keep this sort of element of, you know, youngness in clothes.

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

- [Interviewer] This meant what to you?

- [Mary Quant] It could... Growing up meant to me, you know, getting into stockings and suspenders.

What, you call them garters don't you?

And high heels and having artificial hair and artificial nails.

You know, a bosom that came into the room about two minutes for the rest of you.

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

- The leftover from the end of the 40's and the very early 50's 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 a sort of erm... a reaction, a 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 the 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, 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 don't want to look like a duchess.

And we certainly don't want what to look like, a duchess, the way a duchess looked two years ago, I wanted to design clothes for real life people.

I wanted to design clothes for young people.

- [Interviewer] You got a lot of your, sort of basic ideas for design or your training in designing, thinking out of design, from art college.

- [Christopher Frayling] Contemporary culture owes almost everything I think to the art school culture in the UK, in the 50s and 60s.

- [Interviewer] Do you think that you would have been just as good a designer if you hadn't been to the art school?

- [Mary Quant] Oh no.

And I think I was lucky that I had a general training rather than, being allowed to specialize so early.

Went to some cutting classes, found myself a table there, got (indistinct) with what I wanted to do.

And 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.

- [Brian Rice] When I was at Goldsmiths, 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.

- [Marion Foale] And its good because we understood each other's art.

We were all, 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 gangli, aristocrat, fun, loving, confident person.

- [Orlando Plunket] There was a lot of theater with my dad.

He spend most of his time at Goldsmiths walking around with a film canister under his arm cause he was involved in some kind of film project.

You know, he had, he had a way about him.

He had a charm, charisma that just, you know, just whipped everybody up and wanted to go along for, you know, this amazing ride.

He lived a lifestyle that was, was very intoxicating.

You know, he, he very much was a muse and, and an inspiration for her.

- How did I meet her?

Well I didn't meet her the first time, first time at the Chelsea Arts Ball, my, end of my first term at art school.

I hadn't ever seen her at the art school.

Its quite a big place, but er- On the great float which came past, which was our art schools float, was this enormous pile of balloons, there's this practically naked girls sitting on top and erm- I didn't exactly fall in love with her at first sight, I just had this great sort of surge of lust and I determined to try and make friends with her the next term.

So I sort of find out where she was and that sort of thing and joined the same life class.

I was terribly shy.

But one day I just went up and said, "Could I borrow some drawing pins cause I don't have any?"

And she said, "Yes".

So I was so emboldened by that I erm... Asked her to the cinema or something that evening she came.

And we never looked back except in anger since then.

- 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 complimented each other.

- [Heather Tilbury] 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 careness.

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 (indistinct) as far as we can.

He, he realized that that needed to be done.

- [Interviewer] Well what I want to know first of all Mary Quant is, whether you always saw yourself right at the beginning as a revolutionary?

- [Mary Quant] No.

We saw ourselves as sort of outcasts really.

And I'm trying to somehow gang together in Chelsea with very few other people who felt as outcasts as we did.

- [Interviewer] 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 work room, making hats, you know, £2.10 a week for, for rich people.

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's bring it back the next day and say, "My husband doesn't like it".

And the whole thing, you know, it got through to me that this was, sort of unrealistic out of date and nonsense that one person couldn't spend five days making a hat for one woman.

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

Things were rather grim then.

- [Interviewer] Were they so very grim?

- [Mary Quant] They were a bit gloomy if you were very young.

You had no money, no independence.

Cause we wanted a, a more casual way of life and a pleasanter a way of life.

There were no, 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.

And got to know him, he used to... - [Hamish McNair] My father, Archie McNair, was all one of the funders of that 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 he came in wearing, I think he was wearing a bowler hat.

Umbrella and briefcase and all that sort of thing.

And I thought, good God, you know, but in fact, made great friends with him and he was, I think, first person to see what was happening in Chelsea clearly from any points of view and from our point of view, from a commercial point of view.

- [Hamish McNair] One of his early ventures was a coffee bar, number 128 Kings Road.

He had the first or I think had the second espresso machine in London in the mid 50s.

- Well, the King's Road was the place.

Everyone went down the Kings Road for coffee houses more than anything.

Although it's very fashionable now, it was far more colorful and it was just very exciting.

- [Pattie Boyd] Gradually, a lot of young people started showing their creativity whether they are painters or artists or poets or filmmakers or photographers and would be models, everybody sort of intermingled and it was a really good fun buzz.

- And there were lots of these kind of young people's club, I don't know whether they called them R&B clubs.

The old trad bands had been trying to funk up the music a bit.

It changed the whole shape of what English musicians were doing.

It was all up for grabs you know.

- You know, this was after all ten 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 have got a special talent like that, they can't help themselves.

And it will come out one way or another.

- I'd become more, more interested in this idea of, um, well at least that there were a few people like me who didn't want these, these clothes that existed even before you got into them.

- I had this girlfriend who was interested in clothes and I was interested clothes too.

And he was interested in expanding his businesses in the King's Road and so we all three got together and that was the start of the thing.

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

- [Archie McNair] 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, an Archie Mcnair who had trained as a lawyer was a businessman.

- [Mary Quant] 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 where, you know, fools step in.

Nobody said you can't do it, We just did it.

- When she opened Bazaar in 1955, the sort of things she wanted to sell in Bazaar just wasn't available.

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

- And we used to go into various manufacturers and say, "We want to buy some dresses please" if they weren't absolutely rude, they'd get through the pretense of taking an order from us.

The stuff would never turn up because they didn't believe in these kids with a shop, you know.

- [Mary Quant] The thing was, we open the door of the shop and there was a queue and people were four deep outside and people just flooded in.

- [Jill Kennington] Bazaar was a funky, lively little boutique.

And it was like a light went on.

I mean, it was just fantastic color and exuberant and young.

Young.

So it was a sort of social scene as well.

- [Mary Quant] It was very unorthodox.

People had to take their clothes off in the middle of the floor and try things on out of the packing case because there was really only one changing room and it, it was such a success.

We, we where we were just bowled over from the day we opened.

- I mean, what I find amazing was her windows.

You know, the fact that she realized that their mannequins were all completely wrong for the clothes that she was doing and had these mannequins made in like really cute sort of like boxing shapes.

- [Brigid Keenan] 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 by direct patterns, they were adapting them.

They were being sewn up in the flat.

She would take them to the shop to sell them and then go and buy more fabric.

And that's really how it started.

- [Mary Quant] I designed for myself and my friends.

- [Interviewer] But enough of them bought your clothes to keep you afloat in the beginning?

- [Mary Quant] 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 a, an early mod.

Very cool, 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, you could 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 simple.

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've a very strong look that said somehow, look at me, isn't life marvelous?

The modern woman 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 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 of textiles were key to what she did.

Rough tweeds, she used linens, plain fabrics, simple colors, and she really wanted to create something youthful and sophisticated.

- [Brigid Keenan] 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.

- [Mary Quant] I bought men's suiting's from Harrods.

Tunic dresses from these pin stripe men's suiting's, Prince of Wales and cheques and things like that.

- She had this kind of way of, of changing classics.

I did a shoot and, and the editor was trying to explain to me about the male cardigan that become the female cardigan.

It was because of Mary Quant.

- [Mary Quant] Persuaded knitwear manufacturers to, to make men's cardigans like Rex Harrison cardigans, about 10 inches longer, which was a very short dress length.

And had elongated shirts made I called 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 color.

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

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

- [Mary Quant] The colors were strong, sort of parity greens and maroon and plum and yellow oaker and purples and so on.

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

I persuaded theatrical manufacturers to make tights in all the colors of the clothes.

- We didn't have tights 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 the second the second Bazaar which was much larger and that was completely designed by Terence Conran.

And then it just went from there.

- [Mary Quant] The clothes I produced were so acceptable to the, the Chelsea girl at that time.

She was far more emancipated than the equivalent French girl.

Many young in England were in that mood.

- [Interviewer] It is handy if you can discover or seem to discover a trend in society.

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 that the designer has to be someone who's permanently bored, permanently bored with the way people look at any particular time.

And want, wanting to 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 you put the spotlight on Mary Quant, there's a clear correlation between the women's movement and the clothes that she was designing.

- [Protesters] What do we want?

Equal education.

What do we want?

- Some men have still got the, the idea of the Victorian era, like you know what I mean?

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 freedoms, to have your own life.

Not be dominated by men all the time.

I mean, 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, dress the part of being her.

- [Terry Newman] They were sort of perfect princesses, cooking and cleaning for their husbands, wearing immaculate sort of twin sets and pearls and petticoats and lace.

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

- Clothes are 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.

- Give the pill, of seeing the contraceptives they actually worked, a woman could then really be in charge of her own life.

Decide when she had children.

- The pill conception helped to liberate you.

It did.

- And this, this allows her then to plan, both a private life, a 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.

- [Mary Quant] It was the first time that women could plan and have their own careers.

- [Voiceover] If you stay on in the service, it offers a career which could lead to the very top.

- [Mary Quant] And therefore the first time they had their own money and made her own choices.

I think a revolution was going on which fashion people hadn't realized.

I think the change of focus had gone from the rich international couture thing to young working girl herself.

She was going to sort of set the pace in fashion, 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 mini skirt evolved from.

- I think she started the mini skirt didn't she?

- That is the number one question.

- She started the mini skirt.

- Did Mary Quant invent the mini skirt?

Something that people will discuss forever.

- Didn't she?

Didn't she?

Didn't she?

- [Interviewer] Is the mini truly yours?

- [Mary Quant] Oh yes.

Because the Chelsea girl, you know, she had the best legs in the world.

She wants the short skirts that I just gave (indistinct) - [Interviewer] So scandal... - [Mary Quant] And 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 mini skirt - [Mary Quant] The mini skirt - Because she loved the mini car.

And she thought it was a wonderful name.

They called it the mini skirt, but really at that point it was just a skirt above the knee.

I mean, even the queen was wearing skirts above the knee.

- Mary was the one that got them shorter and shorter.

- The girls that came in to buy, would say, "I want my skirt length shorter, shorter, shorter.

- [Mary Quant] Shorter.

Shorter.

Shorter.

- The London girl was rolling it up an inch shorter, so then I'd go an inch shorter, then you know, cause they grew up with the opposite.

- You know, you looked around and your friends skirts were shorter and you thought, oh, and you said, "Mum, will you shorten my dress with me?"

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

So you shortened it by three inches.

And then once tights were available for everybody, you could have that as short you wanted.

So they got shortened again.

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

- I thought with the idea of the mini skirt was designed by a guy, because, you know, you'd go in the back of a pub or beer club and (whooshes) The mini skirt was perfect for that.

- [Mary Quant] The whole 1960s, was one massive party.

Which was super lovely.

- [Voiceover] Women, they now will be irreversibly emancipated.

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.

- [Mary Quant] And whether it's to be attractive or whether it's to be happy within yourself and competent within yourself or both, or all these things, you know, the clothes can very much help you play these, these roles.

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

For kids today in, you know, 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.

- [Mary Quant] I can see very easily looking back.

I mean clothes are marvelous 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 mini skirt was just so much fun.

And it epitomized fun and frivolity of the 1960s in the Kings 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.

- And Mary, isn't the mini skirts rather obvious, simply blaringly enticing?

After all it seems that few girls really 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'm doing or hated it.

- Many times there'd be people in the street who'd go... (gasps) - [Mary Quant] Like some old gentlemen used to come in and sort of really shake their umbrellas at me.

- Oh I can say that I particularly approve of some of the styles.

- Shout, "obscene, disgusting, degeneration", you know, and they couldn't explain why it was obscene or degenerate except that to them, to certain people it was.

- Youth at the time was a lot about wearing something that old people didn't like and think, it must be good.

It was a total of experimentation.

Like the drugs and fashion and especially music.

- [Pete Townshend] The Beatles, they sounded like an R&B band, but their songs were about love and girls and that sort of teenage stuff.

The stones were rebellious.

Popular because they were confident and arrogant, glamorous, both bands, they changed the way that we looked at ourselves.

They changed the way that we dress.

I often talk about The Who being on stage, looking at their audience, copying what people in the audience were wearing so that 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 changes.

- Mary Quant was quite conscious of the fact that she was the heart of a youth quake.

She knew, by the time we get to the 60s that what was happening around her reflected what she was doing in fashions.

- Mary Quant's first show that I ever saw, the models came kind of dancing in.

They were full of life and it was just elevating.

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.

- [Clare Hunt] When you did her show, she didn't want everybody just mincing down the catwalk exactly the same.

She wanted the personnel to 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 the manner that leaves the spectators and the models breathless.

(indistinct commotion) - [Alexander Plunket] I'm not really concerned with the design in the way that 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.

- [Alexander Plunket] Hey.

- [Mary Quant] Alexander.

- Plunket Greene was the wind beneath her wings and sheltered her and enabled her to sort of 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.

- [Pattie Boyd] She and Alexander and some business people decided that they would 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.

We came downstairs for breakfast wearing our trouser suits, our Mary Quant's trouser suit, feeling cool, you know, walking in and they would, they wouldn't let us in because we were wearing trouser.

- [Prue Berry] You would go into a hotel and you'd get in a lift and then people would say, "Oh, where'd you get that haircut?"

and "what about this?"

And "What about that?"

They all wanted to know and be part of this, this old 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 it, what she was doing connected with zeitgeist and think it was Womenswear Daily that saw her collection and just went crazy for it and went, you know, this is it, you know, this is what we want to be wearing, this is what the, you know, girls of America want to be wearing.

- They were absolutely mad for Mary Quant.

And would sort of look at her in her own different way, because she was so swinging London.

- And it's a certain Britishness that the world needed at the time, you know, America was so obsessed with the British invasion.

- [Reporter] The cries of the crowd grow in pitch and volume.

Drowning out the... - When the Beatles entered New York, there was literally, there was pandemonium.

- [Reporter] 3,000 screening teenagers are 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 fellow.

- [Pattie Boyd] It was quite extraordinary to see it and slightly terrifying as well because they were going completely mad.

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

This is great.

[Woman] If the Beatles provided the soundtrack, Mary certainly provided all the visual images.

- And she was right at the center of 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 Merry and it really put this country on the map.

- [Voiceover] Clothes by Quant are building a reputation in the States as well.

- Very quickly, particularly people like JC penny realized that Mary could add so much to their sports wear, dress wear, separates collections and it seemed within a remarkably short space of time, she was producing 4, 6, 8 collections a year for them.

- So many things are different in America, cause you know very well that they've got to translate the different fabrics and so on, so they can work from drawings quite a lot.

But you must be in touch with the people in their sample rooms and understand that the salespeople got to be in touch with you so everybody knows what's going on.

I think it, you know, I mean, I think it can be terribly exciting.

I really do.

- Well this'll be great, I mean, obviously it takes a hell of a lot arranging and everything but I'd love to do it really.

- Well... it's not a question of whether you'd love to do it.

You've bloody well got to do it now.

- They were going to meet the head of JC penny and they were really excited about it and they were on the way to Washington.

So they're all nice and relaxed.

They're having champagne and caviar in first-class and everything.

About five minutes before we come into land.

- [Flight Announcement] please be sure your seat backs are in the upright... - A the crew member comes up 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 "(gasps) No."

And she went into a panic.

She got up to go to the loo.

She wouldn't come home to the room.

They're knocking on the door, "Come out, come..." She said "No, I can't, I can't."

So they let everybody get off the plane and Mary's looking out of 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.

(cameras shuttering) - [Alexander Plunket] Actually Mary hates sort of being photographed.

I mean, she always, I think dreads it more than hates it when it happens.

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

The awful thing is she's frightfully good at this in a way.

I mean, she looks like herself.

She looks exactly like what Mary Quant ought to look like.

And wears her own clothes rather well and so on.

You know, I mean, she has sleepless nights before being interviewed by somebody or being photographed, but it has to be done.

- I'm sure the working relationship between Mary and Plunket was the strength of the whole thing.

- [Orlando Plunket] 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've done it without him.

- He was always there at Mary's side.

And quite often he would kind of like take the first question and start it off.

And then when you could see that she was ready to go, where she chipped in, he'd kind of like faded 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, she's more, you know, reserved than shy.

- Cause she had her husband who was a brilliant impresario entrepreneur, great at the smooth talking, great at the PR.

- Kansas City was fantastic, about 4,000 kids turned up and they had to get the fire department cause they thought the floor was gonna collapse and then, me and the girls all had to have police protection to get us back to the hotel.

You where the Beatles had been there only about a week before and the whole place is so mad about England you know, you've never seen anything like it.

- [Orlando Plunket] You know, my father, you know, brought an energy, but also was incredibly innovative in terms of marketing and PR.

- [Hamish McNair] And Alexander also was very good at speaking to the press.

I think my father was saying he 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 the living was kind of tight 24/7.

- I would say, "Right, who would like tea?

Who would like coffee?"

And Alexandra would say, "Sarah, forget the tea and coffee, we're just gonna 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, "Okay, no, just gin and tonics."

Mary was always trying to keep him a bit healthier, but he was a fun, big character.

- [Brigid Keenan] 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 cause 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?

- [Archie McNair] He got tremendous coverage.

I mean the column inches that he achieved on behalf of Bazaar, it would have cost a fortune to buy that sort of space.

- [Interviewer] You said that you recognize that, in part at least, the phenomenal growth of the idea of the Kings Road and the Chelsea set and so forth, stemmed from the publicity given to it in a way in which writers wrote it up in magazines.

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

They always seeing what's new, what's hot.

And yeah, if a designed really catches the fashion editor's eye, anything is possible really.

- [Brigid Keenan] 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, really powerful.

- We you chose this girl because she could water ski and there isn't a single one of her water skiing.

The sort of girls we want to see photographed in our clothes are, look as real as possible and live as possible.

- And then combine that with photographers like Bailey.

- 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 that 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 it was essentially about models.

- [Voiceover] There had never been anything like her in the history of the world.

- You know, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, you know, all of these incredible English girls.

- [Kate Moss] They had a lot 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 she's so lovely.

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

Jean Shrimpton gave me tips on men.

- [Director] What did she say?

- [Kate Moss] I can't say.

- [Director] Oh... (both laugh) - 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.

- [Hamish McNair] ] Mary and Alexandra were very much, very much artists.

But what they liked was really a great understanding of business and the reality of it.

- [Archie McNair] I had a running battle with Mary about the amount of cloth she bought for her designs.

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

And it was due to the lack of discipline and (indistinct) of clothes.

We were losing a lot of money.

- [Hamish McNair] I think what he saw is that Mary Quant could be marked as a, 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 manufacturer.

- Archie was very much the man who pushed the licensing.

I think initially against Mary's wishes.

- [Serena Rees] 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 licensors that, that's where you've got to get it right.

- [Man] She basically believed she could do it all and I think probably deep down, there was a resentment of anybody trying to help her.

- [Alexander Plunket] Something about the pockets.

- Well, you know, you know, he'd like to get rid of those pockets all together but I think it makes the whole thing.

You know, it'll save him ten pence, but so, it makes the dress.

- [Serena Rees] 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.

- [Mary Quant] Made me interested in underwear immediately because I wanted to make 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, specifically into makeup, which I think is one of the, the big things that she did.

- I, I got involved with the makeup bit because er... Now that the clothes were different, the face was wrong.

- She was like, well we revolutionized the way people wore fashion.

The face then didn't match and the face didn't match because coming out to the 1950s, it was red lips and it was sort of blue eyeshadow.

And she just said, "I'm sorry, but with the kind of bold color palette that I'm now using the face just doesn't match."

And so then she decided to then take on cosmetics.

- Right, whose got an eyebrow pencil?

- [Mary Quant] Model girls, top model girls like Jean Shrimpton, my friends, we'd be doing shows together and the way they approach make-up was something quite else.

Buying certain sort-of theatrical makeup and using a sort of technique which was part color and part sculpting, an 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 baby doll, aesthetic.

She sort of took that and bottled it.

- [Voiceover] Designer Mary Quant is just one of the breakaway generation who is now dreamed up a revolutionary approach to cosmetics, which even department stores like Selfridges have taken up.

- She did this, 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, she hooked onto things.

She was alert.

She saw her ideas.

- [Mary Quant] I'm so messy, I can never find the right brushes and the right bits.

So I wanted a box where everything was in the same box.

- Packaging was part of that, selling that dream.

Coming up with the paintbox idea.

I mean it was revolutionary at the time to actually her thinking about how do I put on makeup?

I've got everything in different places.

I make a mess.

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

- You lifted the lid and there was eyeshadow and blush 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 makeup was just, oh, you had to have that.

- [Mary Quant] They're made of plastic and I love plastic, the smell of plastic.

Why do we apologize and pretended it's gold, you know, its erm... its you know, hundred carats good plastic.

- [Interviewer] Did you find that what you were demanding and wanting as a designer was being matched by the capacity of technology to manufacture?

- Yes.

I mean sometimes I think new ideas come from the technology and sometimes the other way round.

Really, it's how I into this shoe thing, because I've never had a pair of comfortable shoes in my life, and I wanted to make shoes which were like er... glass or bottles and have no seams and the bits that rub and all that.

We just pour a kind of chewing gum into a mold and you get out what you want.

And you know, rather like making a sort of jelly.

And so this is how we started making these shoes.

And then really it's like a Cinderella thing you have.

You're walking on air or walking in a glass slipper.

- [Orlando Plunket] 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.

- [Woman] 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.

- [Voiceover] Now came the award.

A proud moment, surely for Mary Quant, honoured by winning the award for Britain.

- The business actually was a dream business from the point of view of a fashion designer.

So many fashion designers would only been able to turn their ideas and creations into business if they've had a good business partner.

- [Archie McNair] 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 developed.

We could keep making a success of what we were doing, but I wanted to expand.

- You've got Archie, realizes 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 it to hard cash.

- [Voiceover] Milan.

- [Voiceover] (speaking foreign language) Mary Quant.

- [Voiceover] Paris.

- [Voiceover] (speaking foreign language) Mary Quant.

- [Voiceover] (speaking foreign language) Mary Quant.

- [Clare Hunt] She was international.

Everyone in Europe knew about her.

She was big in America.

- [Voiceover] Last year's American sales alone topped two million dollars.

- Apparently she's big in Australia as well.

- [Voiceover] Mary quant comes to Australia.

- This was a great power of Mary Quant.

It was the export.

- The thing that was growing at that time for them was the cosmetics.

And that was becoming a big business.

- [Pat Mash] By 1970, Quant Cosmetics was ginormous.

It seemed the whole world is clamoring for Mary's makeup and clothes.

- We've got a journalist coming in from Finland.

We've got the fittings at Ginger Group in the morning and you've got a meeting in the afternoon.

I'd really like to talk to you about this USA and Canadian trip because of fabric people come here.

Wednesday (indistinct crosstalk) in Manchester all day to make this commercial radio tape.

- Well which of these can you get me out of?

- [Archie McNair] I thought we didn't need the shops.

And so the only real role I ever had with Mary was when I said, "I'm got to sell in the shops."

And 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 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 Limited, one of the most astonishing success stories in the world of fashion.

Licensing manufacturers on five continents.

- [Woman] It was frenetic.

Absolutely frenetic.

We couldn't make it fast enough.

- [Alexander Plunket] Well, there are thousands of people working for the manufactures we design for who are dependent on Mary jolly well coming up with the goods.

And if she doesn't do it, she is getting down people and endangering their jobs.

- The pressure wasn't so much on Alexandra and Archie, it was all about Mary.

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

- [Woman] I'm sure the demands on her were just sort of - we want more and more and more until you put boundaries down.

I suppose it, you know, if it comes 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, 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 for four years.

And the Beatles disbanded in I think 1968, you know, but Mary had to keep on going.

(I see you by The Pretty Things playing) ♪ As evening shadows chase the sun ♪ 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 you had 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.

- [Clare Hunt] 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 that Mary Quant had brought to fashion was no longer in style.

- London physically was an enormously different town from the 60s during the 70s.

- [News Reader] From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14% or so less in term of... - [News Reader 2] Indication came this afternoon of higher prices.

- It had actually gone slow.

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 spit 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 have changed.

Things had come to an end and, and people, people pined for the country.

I think they watched McCartney sitting on his farm in Scotland with, with Linda and, and everyone, everyone had a similar idea.

(gun shots) - [Orlando Plunket] I'll never forget the, the video footage of them having a row over clay pigeon shooting.

(gun shots) - I got it.

- I got it.

- I got it.

- But my darling it was falling down dead be the time you were even there.

- You missed it.

- Christ.

- [Orlando Plunket] I guess you could say they embraced country, countryside life.

- I absolutely love cows.

(cow mooing) They are the most fascinating, gentle and beautiful animals.

(cow mooing) Ten to live in the fields near my house.

I love to talk to them and they talk to me.

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.

- Orlando, it's bed time.

"And in Nonsense land the trees are red and the grass is blue.." - [Clare Hunt] She always had a fantastic relationship with Orlando.

And he with her.

And I think he filled a big gap for her.

- [Mary Quant] Privacy to me is more important.

My relationship with a Orlando, although I don't want to hide him away because I'm so proud of him.

- [Orlando Plunket] I don't know.

I think, 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, of sort of bomb shelter.

And it was kind of funny where we kind of went to hide, which I think is inevitable when you've got paparazzi at the end of the drive.

(screaming) - Where's Orlando?

Orlando.

Hey.

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

It was quite sort of Sunday lunchy, quite conventional.

- It's hot.

God it's hot.

- [Pat Mash] 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 that was what?

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 that about an industry she doesn't even know so much about.

- [Perfume Tester] 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 to balance the chance and that is very ambitious.

At the same time, one wants flattery and prettiness and all the rest of it.

And I think... - [Perfume Tester] There's a duality now in woman which is the better thing.

- This... perverse schizophrenia, is, is the mood that I would like to, to arrive at.

- [Perfume Tester] Yes, I would, I would agree entirely.

But I think that to satisfy that, you have to come up with two types of perfume.

- Because its the same woman.

- [Perfume Tester] one which- - 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 I think the modern woman, it's very perverse and she would then use the so called evening one in the daytime.

- She would just come up with some idea or the other and you'd think, "Really?"

- [Mary Quant] So can we not get both these notes going?

- [Clare Hunt] If like the guys from ICI or the Wool Board or whatever made that areas products would say, "Oh we couldn't, we can't do that.

That's not possible."

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

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

- I don't, I don't agree.

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

- And she just sat there.

- [Perfume Tester] Yes.

Well, we'll work hard at it, but it's, it's very difficult what you asking, erm... - She smiled at them, and didn't say anything and I'm thinking, (gasps) gosh, this is getting embarrassing.

"Okay.

We'll see what we can do."

She got her, 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 realize that she was right.

- Well, that's just dirty.

- [Interviewer] To me your clothes seem much more classical than they were in the 60s.

How would you describe them?

- I suddenly feel the mood for very classical clothes.

But modern classics, you know, with a, 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 fashion is anticipated a general attitude and economic problems and all sorts of things.

And fashion has become the last two, three years, very, very classical.

instead of the aggressive look of the 60s, which was natural to it's time.

But right now, I mean, nobody wants upheaval, nobody wants the drama of wars and so on and, and so they leap at nostalgia and there's this element of nostalgia came through everything.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Mary Quant] Fashion is always about change and I'm designing into the future.

- [Interviewer] Yes, so it does bring me to a rougher question that you almost answered it in the sense that, as yesterday's revolutionary, today's establishment figure.

Is that you?

- [Mary Quant] Well It obviously isn't.

- I think, you know, it is hard to keep up and keep up, you know, the zeitgeist changes.

- [Paul Simonon] The world seemed to be filled middle-class hippies, sort of wearing flares and shuffling up and down the high street.

Young people suddenly found they had the sound and lyrics that they could relate to and not sort of in a way, mirrored the mood, the mood of their Britain.

- [Pete Townshend] They were a sort of social revolution cause they didn't seem to care about money or fame or success.

- [Interviewer] How far would you say that prints and punk fashions were a product of the kids themselves and the designers caught onto it afterwards?

- [Mary Quant] They were a product of the kids themselves.

Absolutely.

It was a reaction against, you know, manufacturing and, and desire to be individual.

- [Pete Townshend] 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 Vivianne Westwood and some of her cohorts had two or three shops.

- When you look at Vivianne Westwood, there is that parallel with Mary Quant.

Both pioneering new ground.

- [Pete Townshend] People like Mary Quant made it possible for us to proceed.

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

- Oh don't ask me about King's Road Cause I hate it.

- [Mary Quant] Well I'm a doll maniac.

Being asked to work on a doll and design the clothes was absolutely irresistible to me because I loved them.

- [Alexander Plunket] If I can get it on, anybody can.

- Are the glasses straight?

Because I've got odd ears.

They can be crooked.

Are these straight?

- [Woman] Yeah, they're straight.

- Right.

- [Woman] Everybody quiet.

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

- This resulted with a 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 that everything was named.

Even the horse.

(horse neighs) - [Girl] Archie.

- I know it gave Cindy a terrible fright or Barbie or one of the two.

- [Doll Voiceover] Argh help me.

- And then of course I had piece de resistance.

Her underwear.

These were the little panties.

Did you want me to put them on the doll?

You can hardly see them.

You can see why they never reached productive.

- [Mary Quant] 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.

Hmm.

- [Brigid Keenan] 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 gonna be 40.

So that's what I'll do.

I will 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 10 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 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 than 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.

- She continued to design garments and that went on right through into the 80s.

- I think for 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.

- [Mary Quant] If that fashion came into the house, we didn't want to go out as before.

- [Interviewer] But now that you are into so many different 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 from 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.

- [Roger Tredre] Today, when 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 got a massive business network now 130 shops in Japan.

- Yes.

- [Jeremy Paxman] Clearly there's not that greater gulf of understanding in terms of appreciation of your design.

- I think from the fashion point of view and a design point of view, that there's a very, very strong bond.

- [Archie McNair] The way Mary look really cottoned on the Japanese girls identified with Mary very well and they, they loved her.

- [Terry Newman] All roads led basically to Japan in the makeup leg of her business, which has obviously been, as you say, licensed to the hilt.

- [Interviewer] What have the Japanese taught you about selling?

- [Mary Quant] Oh so much.

That shopping should be fun.

- [Archie McNair] The Japanese wanted to include all sorts of other products.

Fashion accessories in fact.

And gradually won Mary over from her stamps of saying nobody could 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 so wonderful to work with.

I've learned so much.

I think we can all achieve so much together.

- [Archie McNair] I was finding my work difficult because I go and a chair of meeting of the subsidiary company and, and 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 interest of everybody, I shouldn't be there.

The next morning I thought, well, yesterday I employed 750 people now just employ one.

- [Director] When you father the passed away, he was quite young.

- [Orlando Plunket] Yep.

- [Director] Was he in his 50s - [Orlando Plunket] Yep.

- [Orlando Plunket] Could you tell me if it was a sudden thing?

- [Orlando Plunket] Er... Yes, it was relatively, but um, I don't think if you smoke 60 jeter a day and like a glass of wine, you're not going to last forever.

- [Hamish McNair] While very... Just terribly sad that he had to go so early on.

He was just a, a great shaft of color 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've 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.

Alexandra 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 re think who she was and how she related to people.

- [Orlando Plunket] I think losing my father was probably 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, it's, it's so much part of our DNA and it has what she adores.

- [Archie McNair] Years later.

I mean, long after I had retired, Mary asked me to come over and have lunch with her.

She had something to discuss and she said, "You'd be proud of me.

I've done this tremendous deal with the Japanese.

It 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.

- [Woman] All good things come to an end.

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

At some point you have to let go.

- To actually see someone who was so brilliant.

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

And to then, to not really have that control of her business side of things.

I think it must be quite difficult for her.

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

Well, it's very competitive.

- [Sara Hollamby] If you want your brand to have longevity, if you want your brand to exist, once you're gone, which I think, you know, for somebody spent a lifetime working to, to create what they've created to then when you aren't around anymore for that to disappear would be really sad.

- [Terry Newman] It's just the way the cycle of fashion exists.

She handed over the reigns, to, to somebody who could kind of move her brand on.

(piano music) - [Director] Do you think her legacy has lived on?

- I mean, I mean the fact that Mary quant doesn't exist now as a major fashion brand, I think in some respects is neither here nor there, because when you look at her history, it's resonates and it's got threads through to, to the things that designers still do today.

- [Director] As a 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.

- So what was wrong with High Street.

It's just completely a rip off because all those things are made with really cheap labor and they're just going to landfill and there's no choice at all.

And I'm trying to, to do something about fashion.

I'm going to try to buy less, choose well, 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 in and operate within.

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

We can't carry on.

It was just too many seasons, too many clubs, too many things that we didn't need.

I did an issue with Taylor swift on the cover, in a vintage 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 anymore.

We don't want to be using plastic as much.

We have 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 it's a 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 for Autumn/Winter 20 Mark Fast was showing on the final morning, and the headlines were all about Mark Fast min skirts, colored tights, directly inspired of course by Mary Quant as he fully acknowledged.

- I think a lot of designers don't recognize perhaps they're drawing on Mary Quant's influence.

- I think she influenced everybody from Calvin Klein to... - [Dennis Nothdruft] 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 all the things that 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.

- [Voiceover] Internationally she is the most well-known British designer and people still equate her name as synonymous with the mini skirt.

- Mary Quant is without a doubt, one of the most important British designers ever.

- That "Free yourself, be yourself" amazing quote that she gave the world and ultimately gave everyone enough courage to free themselves of the shackles of certain clothing.

(instrumental music) - [Orlando Plunket] 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 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 in.

Fashion is for now and if you're still enjoying living and you're still enjoy being a woman and being sexy and being alive, then you know, one want surely to wear the clothes of today.

It's nothing to do with age or anything else.

Seems to me.

(upbeat music)