Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Mary Quant

London-based designer Mary Quant (1934-) was so in love with fashion that when she was six years old and sick with the measles, she passed the time by cutting up her bedsheets to make dresses. A visionary designer far ahead of her time, Quant grew up to invent the definitive mod look of the 1960s, creating miniskirts, colorful tights, and hot pants. She attended art school at Goldsmith's College of Art and made her official entry into the fashion world with her first job at a millinery boutique. She first met her husband at a costume ball, dressed in only mesh tights and strategically placed balloons. Quant was the living embodiment of the sexually liberated soul and style of the ’60s. At the age of twenty-one she opened her first boutique, Bazaar, on King’s Road and sold to teenagers. When she couldn’t find clothes that she wanted to sell there, she hired a dressmaker and set up a studio in her apartment to start designing them herself. She deconstructed dress patterns, shortened hemlines, and added Peter Pan collars. Quant was the first designer to design for her generation—and she was great at it. She didn’t care about making money; she wanted to create innovative, fun, affordable fashions for women, so everyone from typists to royalty dropped by her shop. While older generations thought her clothes were vulgar, Quant was honored with the prestigious Sunday Times International Fashion Award in 1963, which validated her wild imagination.