Gender as a place of sexual opposition and vindication was a mined territory which, in the years of the “second wave” of the feminist movement, became an obligatory paradigm within the exploration of the body. The plurality of forms of women’s activism and mobilization was articulated with the re-emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement and with the Women’s Liberation Movement, an organ of radical political practice and theoretical reflection. In these years of conquests for women’s rights, in the effervescent climate of the Sixties and well before the outbreak of the Sixty-eight, it was the revolutionary English designer Mary Quant (Blackheath, 1934 – Surrey, 2023) who, in 1963, created the miniskirt. Yesterday, alas, the London icon passed away at the age of 93, but her cultural and political significance is inscribed in the eternity of her feat. Quant was the true and only counter-current fashion designer, whose foresight and ruthlessness freed women all over the world from the retro and patriarchal desire of the subjugated idea of the feminine.
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The art of wearing bare skinIL MINISKIRT devised by Mary was a blow to the heart of the patriarchal machismo that had always asked consorts, sisters, daughters and lovers to cultivate private vices and exhibit public virtues. The Mini Minor car inspired the Quant, created a few years earlier by designer Alec Issigonis who wanted to rejuvenate cars by adapting them to an informal and uninhibited way of life. Since 1955 she opened her forerunner Bazaar boutique, located in London’s Kings Road, which at that time became a place of worship for the Swinging London generation.
The advent of the miniskirt, was at the beginning, stinging. Dior and the Fontana sisters immediately took sides against the emergence of a symbol that many saw as a sign of strongly Marxist left-wing radicalism. In France it was considered a provocative act and an incitement to sexual violence and the Holy See tightened the rules for entering places of worship, forbidding it.
Mary Quant
I’ve always designed clothes since I was little because I didn’t like how they were, paralyzing and unnatural. Good taste is death, vulgarity is lifeIt was identified as the emblem of perdition, as well as of malpractice. In reality it represented a sort of self-government of the body, shattering the familiar and familist, submissive and maternal image. Furthermore, it dismantled the idea of the oblative and non-seductive feminine, sublimated in the domestic virtues. The miniskirt was a sort of visual hurricane that reinvented the female body in its Körper and its Leib, which exploded and raged in the streets of the whole world, irreverently, with its rebellious load, since it forever undermined the male power to decide again on the female body. Long live Mary Quant who pushed women to assert themselves with a simple outfit, which however buried years of bustiers and crinolines. But it wasn’t just that. Fashion, however ephemeral and glamorous it may be (which is one of its merits), has a planetary cultural impact. The idea of the feminine certainly changed, but the environment and the relationship that was established between them in the time gap that separated from the utopia of protest changed
of May 68. Quant reinvented the allure, outlining a body landscape that lent itself to the modern style life, in which the dress was not only decoration and sublimation but was almost a functional device for the frenetic life of modernity. It was a total bodily reset (which certainly involved a cultural and political emancipation): he tore up the antiquated coiffures with the memorable geometric and asymmetrical cuts of Vergottini and Vidal Sasson, he redesigned the bodily geometries with decisive and A-line lines without sleeves and in jersey, he devised raincoats with electric colored PVC hats, overalls, trousers and gaudy tights, which rested on the shapes of the body without following the male fetishistic moldings. He visibly shortened the hems of the skirts showing those legs that have always been a “forbidden object”, designed hot pants, leveraged on high boots, rewrote concrete art with patterns and beat abstractions, realizing two-tone solutions from clothes to accessories. In 1966 he launched a line of cosmetics and footwear and immolated, as his muse, the seventeen-year-old Leslie Hornby better known as Twiggy, the unconventional, almost androgynous supermodel (as if she came out of Andy Warhol’s Factory) symbol of the cultural shock that Quant he was imposing.
HIS IDEA of the female body was liberating and aesthetic, as it was in the same golden years, the sculptural one of Paco Rabanne and the engineering one of André Courrèges. Absolute myths. Despite the radical nature of the anti-conservative aesthetic enterprise, in 1966, she was even made a Knight of the British Colony by Queen Elizabeth, the BBC dedicated the documentary to her The life of Mary Quant. He wrote his autobiography in 1967 Quant by Quant and in 2012 he published Quant by Quant: the Autobiography of Mary Quant. In 2019, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London dedicated the first international retrospective to her which traced her history from 1955 to 1975.
Above all, it was her avant-garde verve that made her immortal even subversive. In fact, Quant, by reforming the style of life, triggered the decision-making power of the self which induced women of entire continents to embody and make explicit their own subjectivity against everything and everyone.