So much more than a miniskirt with a Vidal Sassoon bob

Quant detested the aristocrats and wealthy businessmen’s wives – the “duchesses” – who were major customers for the small but snooty British fashion industry of the 1950s. Having worked supplying hats to this crowd in one of her early jobs, she had first-hand experience of their pettiness, meanness and snobbery.

She believed fashion had to be radically democratised, bringing it within reach of working-class girls who wanted to look stylish.

The most banal critiques of the fashion industry see it as a ruthlessly commercial activity preying on the vanity and specious fantasies of its customers. Quant thought quite differently.

From the very first she saw fashion as empowering, allowing women to express their individuality and find a new self-confidence. In an era of change, when Women’s Liberation was finding its feet, and gender roles in the workpace were being challenged, Quant’s fashion tapped into a social revolution.

All of this is discussed and illustrated in Quant, a feature-length documentary by Sadie Frost, that blends riveting newsreel footage with interviews with fashion experts, and those who knew and worked with the designer. Inserts that use actor Camilla Rutherford, to play Mary Quant and give voice to her thoughts, feel completely redundant. When the historical footage is so brilliant there’s no need to get arty.

The film arrives at a sadly opportune time, as Mary Quant died last month, at the age of 93. She was given a major retrospective at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2019, a version of which travelled to the Bendigo Art Gallery last year. I saw the V&A exhibition, and read her autobiography, Quant by Quant, which fleshes out the rapidly moving montage we get in this documentary.

I love vulgarity, good taste is death, vulgarity is life.

— Mary Quant

Undoubtedly, the seminal event of Quant’s life was her meeting with Alexander Plunket Greene at Goldsmiths art school. The film gives Alexander his due, but not to the same extent that Quant does in her memoirs.

She was a naïve girl from a Welsh middle-class family, brought up with a strict work ethic. He was the offspring of louche nobility, who shunned the very idea of commerce. She had the creativity, he had the charm. Their good friend Archie McNair had all the financial acumen.

Although the film was made a couple of years ago, Quant declined to be interviewed, perhaps feeling she would sooner be remembered as a young woman in a miniskirt with a Vidal Sassoon bob.

She often struggled to overcome her shyness, once locking herself in the restroom of a plane until the press and cameramen had given up and left the tarmac.

One interviewee recalls how she wanted to write a story about idols of youth culture turning 40. When Quant refused to participate, she learned that the designer routinely knocked five years off her official age so as not to appear older than her husband. She was already 45.

Quant’s success was instantaneous. From the moment she and Alexander and Archie opened their boutique, Bazaar, on the Kings Road, in 1955, she was selling clothes faster than they could be designed and made.

This was partly because as newcomers to the fashion business they didn’t understand all the costs involved, and frequently sold at a loss. This changed when Quant was lionised by the fashion press, then picked up by huge American chains such as JCPenney.

Archie McNair got them into branding, and this is when the cash started rolling in. The big sellers were her distinctive make-up kits, but the Quant name was attached to almost everything for a while, even wine.

Today we’ve forgotten just how big Mary Quant became, and the influence she exerted on the way the world dressed.

Rules are invented for lazy people who don’t want to think for themselves.

— Mary Quant

Frost emphasises Quant’s affinities with the music and the democratic ethos of the ’60s, which saw her models dancing down the catwalk accompanied by live jazz or rock.

No matter how rich and successful she became, it was a matter of pride that her clothing was accessible to the average person. She spoke out against “negative” fashion, by which she meant paying a lot for outfits that only helped one blend in with the crowd. For Quant fashion was always a statement.

This documentary makes all these crucial points in a fast-moving montage of the 1960s and beyond. The pop music alone should induce tremors of nostalgia in older viewers.

Even the language takes us back to another era.

Quant once wrote: “I heard my clothes described as dishy, grotty, geary, kinky, mod, poove and all the rest of it. People either loved them or hated them.”

She has taken her place in both fashion and social history at the dishy, geary end of the spectrum.

Quant

Written and directed by Sadie Frost

Starring Mary Quant, Alexander Plunket-Greene, Camilla Rutherford, Dave Davies, Zandra Rhodes, Edward Enninful, Jill Kennington, Kate Moss, Jasper Conran, Tony McGee, Joan Corlass, Heather Tilbury Philllips, Roger Tredre, Clare Hunt

UK, M, 82 mins