Mary Quant, Miniskirt Pioneer, Had Maxi Talent

Glasgow show surveys the queen of Swingin’ Sixties style.

M ary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary is the new exhibition at Kelvingrove, the grand art gallery and museum in Glasgow. Glasgow is one of my favorite places for art, rousing Victorian architecture, raw Scottish spirit, and indecipherable but melodic English. It’s easy to think of it as the supreme flower of industrial, Victorian Britain, but it’s an ancient place the Romans never managed to grab, Christianized by St. Mungo in the sixth century, and home to one of Europe’s oldest universities.

It’s a great art city, too. Charles Rennie Mackintosh lived and worked there, pioneering the distinctive Scottish Arts & Crafts Movement. Art lovers paid for impressive private collections that landed at Kelvingrove or the Hunterian, the University of Glasgow’s museum. The just-renovated and expanded Burrell Collection is in Glasgow, too. This unique accumulation of medieval stained glass, extraordinary Degas pastels, armor, Chinese ceramics, and much else is essential seeing, though the renovators and expanders have come close to wrecking the place. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions. I’ll write about the Burrell in a couple of weeks.

I hadn’t been to Kelvingrove in a few years but wanted to see the Quant show, which I missed when it was at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London earlier this year. I don’t write about the art of fashion often but try to find opportunities. Quant, the genius behind the miniskirt, is a ’60s icon and, more specifically, one of the stars of London’s ’60s mod scene, before the country collapsed in the ’70s via greedy unions and malaise.

And last week, I wrote a bit about Paul McCartney’s early snapshots of the Beatles, on view at the National Portrait Gallery. On Thursday, I wrote about Grayson Perry, the potter and transvestite. Fashion and ’60s London were the fall sugarplums dancing in my head. Off to Glasgow I went. Quant died this past April, and her memorial service was this past week, at the chapel at Hampton Court Palace, no less. Henry VIII lived there. How he would have longed for miniskirts to chase.

Mary Quant displays about a hundred objects and covers her career from 1955, when she opened Bazarre, her experimental boutique on King’s Road in Chelsea, to 1975. During those years she transformed high-street fashion not only with dresses but with cosmetics and accessories. It’s a lovely show. Quant was a design and marketing genius and a pioneer who made cutting-edge fashion accessible to the general public. Her clothes — think Twiggy, Julie Christie in Darling, Emma Peel in The Avengers, miniskirts, and bucket haircuts — defined an era that felt fun and free. “Fashion isn’t frivolous,” Quant said. “It’s part of being alive.”

The exhibition is in the basement of Kelvingrove, which isn’t an ideal space, but the museum is a pile from the 1890s to showcase art but also natural history, a fabulous concert pipe organ in the main hall, and a Royal Air Force Supermarine Spitfire hanging from the ceiling over life-size replicas of elephants and tigers. Glitzy temporary exhibition space wasn’t a priority in Kelvingrove’s last renovation from 2003 to 2006.

Mary Quant is tight and claustrophobic, but overall, it works. The show tells an uplifting, evocative story mostly through the art but smartly supplemented by spaces carved out for full-screen interviews that show Quant both designing and making clothes and with models and buyers. London, drab and depressed, still with bombed-out swaths, came alive in the ’60s, and Mary Quant conveys that new spirit.

The show starts with Bazarre and the 25-year-old Quant, naïve, adventurous, and visionary, the daughter of Welsh school teachers. She devised her shop as “a bouillabaisse of shifts, hats, jewelry, and assorted odds and ends.” Quant made many of the clothes herself, so she started as a couture designer. She had married Alexander Plunket Greene, not rich but a cousin of the Duke of Bedford so he was aristocratic as well as impeccably dressed. Over the next 20 years, she invented and he marketed.

Quant made dresses inspired by Rex Harrison’s long sweaters in My Fair Lady and lengthened into skirts in bold colors such as plum and mustard-yellow. She designed fun display windows and ran impromptu fashion shows. Her early clients ranged from young, working women to debutantes to Audrey Hepburn. “These girls,” Quant said of her customers, “don’t care about accent or class . . . they’re the mods!”

“Mods” indeed, but a nice feature of the exhibition is Quant’s roots in history.  Her ’60s customers reincarnated and democratized the flapper from the ’20s. Quant is no doubt an original thinker and designer, but her tube dresses especially drew from cutting-edge fashion from the post–World War I era.

“Borrowing from the Boys” was Quant’s mantra but also a big part of the first gallery. She used fabric meant for men’s suits and military uniforms, making dresses in pinstripe and with mock epaulets. They’re sold with names such as “Bank of England” and “Barrister.” She also created sleek trousers that evoke jeans, and trouser suits inspired by track suits. Yes, women just off the wagon train and, later, Katharine Hepburn wore trousers, but most British women didn’t wear them in public.

Levi’s jeans, Quant said, were the best-designed clothing in human history. “They’re wearable, tough, and sexy,” she said. Of course, they’re men’s fashion, but Quant always asked herself after finishing a design whether it was as good as a pair of Levi’s.

“It’s all about legs, and where they lead to,” Quant said, and she was honest when she said, “The ends of fashion are sex, sex, sex.” She caught and molded the spirit of the ’60s, but she didn’t invent the miniskirt. In the late ’50s, Balenciaga’s sack dress took the eye off the waist, had a nice, sleek drop, and, by the by, flirted with the knee. In 1959, Yves St. Laurent, then working for Dior, made his Trapeze dresses a bit shorter still but focused more on a minimalist look, with no flashy colors and no decorative flounces. These dresses were still haute couture. They required precise fitting and high-end ironing to get and to keep the look.

Quant’s miniskirts were also easy to produce, which delivered to her a mass market. Materials came from the realm of sportswear — comfortable but tough wool jerseys — and encouraged freer movement of the body. Not much was more different from the formal, flouncy, fitted dresses women wore in the ’50s, and Quant’s dresses were meant to be worn not with spike heels but with flat shoes suitable for running and dancing.

One of her early buyers explained why she loved Quant’s designs: “because I didn’t want to look like my mother.” Or a duchess. Nor, as a busy, active, young woman, did she want to wait for Paris couturiers to tell her what to wear. If anything, Quant was proud to say, “In my shop, duchesses jostle with typists for the same dress.”

Quant subverted the above-the-knee look, a subversion of its own, by giving the miniskirt the look of a pinafore, the uniform of schoolgirls. Her Ginger Group line, premiering in 1963, produced interchangeable separates so women could mix and match. Her Wet Collection, also from 1963, gets a section. Made from plastic-coated cotton, it was her most experimental fabric. It took a while to perfect but established women dressed in it as adventurers who’d go anywhere, rain or shine, and it embraced plastic as cutting-edge.

When Quant received her Order of the British Empire medal from the Queen in 1966, she wore her jersey minidress, a good six inches above the knee, to the ceremony. The dress and spin-offs of it are on display. It’s cream and navy, with slightly puffed sleeves. I think it’s very elegant.

Quant, Plunket Greene, and Archie McNair, who ran the business day to day, were in sync to the point of finishing one another’s sentences. In 1962, McNair arranged a partnership with J.C. Penney and, a couple of years later, with the company called, of all things, Puritan Fashions, licensing her designs for broader production and sale.

The section called “A Paintbox of Ideas” carries Quant’s fashion sense to socks, tights, shoes, berets, underwear, nail varnish, and makeup in her trademark quirky colors. Until Quant, lipstick couldn’t be any color but red. Until Quant, most women wore stockings in a ubiquitous American tan shade attached to a suspended belt, unless you were a Victorian throwback and wore black. It was a short step from the very short skirt to hot pants. Quant was very much in the mix there, too.

I can’t quibble with the exhibition for how it ends, but Mary Quant does indeed end in the mid ’70s with nary a word about what she did with the remaining 50 years of her life. That’s about Quant, not curatorial choice. By 1970 or so, her business was more involved in licensing than design innovation. The ’70s, crazy but unfun, seemed of modest interest to Quant, who had made a bundle by then. Plunket Greene died in 1990. They had a tempestuous marriage, but Quant said that “every day felt like a love affair.”

My larger quibble isn’t the need for the exhibition. Quant is worth a good look. We live in neurotic, conformist times, so thinking about pioneers won’t kill anyone and might encourage a few people to break barriers as she did. She made London into a fashion capital, the London known to be the only city in the world where men are dressed better than women, if only for Savile Row tailoring.

My quibble is the need for the certainly comprehensive catalogue produced by the V&A in London. I read it. There’s nothing mini about it. Quant has written at least three autobiographies, and that’s not counting her how-to fashion books. She’s a witty, incisive writer.

One of the things I liked the most about the Grayson Perry exhibition in Edinburgh was the dominance of the artist’s voice. There are lots of Quant quotes in the exhibition labels, but, in skimming one of her autobiographies, I couldn’t help thinking that she’d said it all, and said it well. The clothes make the show, to be sure, but the video interviews with Quant as a young designer add a lot as well.

Still, Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary is a delight. I wish the Costume Institute at the Met would take it. This week the Met announced a $30 million drive to convert its first-floor shop, which feels like a tacky mall, into primo, new gallery space for the Costume Institute. This is great news. What has become a high-profile, important part of the Met’s collection will now get space by the front door. I hope it incentivizes the curators there to do better exhibitions. The Costume Institute’s biggest exhibitions have become backdrops to its gross annual fundraiser, which is a gala celebrating not depravity and certainly not good taste but trivial, pompous talent.