Quantifying the Influence of Quant.

The media in Britain are today mourning the death of Mary Quant, the leading designer of popular fashion for young women of the boomer generation and a major icon of the Swinging Sixties.

Her main claim to fame was the popularisation of the mini skirt, a sartorial feature lauded at the time for ‘freeing the female leg’ as one commentator put it. I would say that its influence went further than that because it made a substantial contribution to possibly the most notable feature of the period: the development of youth culture. It was a time when young men and women no longer wanted to emulate their parents as earlier generations had. They wanted to be their own people, respectful to the older generations but at the same time separate and a little way removed. And part of that movement involved the boys growing their hair long and the girls wearing their hemlines short.

As a leading light of this social development, therefore, Mary Quant is rightly regarded as a major social innovator. But did her influence have a downside?

Let’s go back to Mary’s main claim to celebrity – the popularisation of the mini skirt. Through a span of history going back hundreds of years, women’s hemlines had ranged from the knee to the ankle and back again. Thighs were strictly private, and the showing of them was not only improper but considered positively immoral. Suddenly the pressure was on young women to open them up to public view, and those of regular proportions saw the change as an emancipating one.

But what of those who were not of regular proportion, those whose thighs were heavy or laced with cellulite, or had other features considered unattractive even by the liberated standards of the Swinging Sixties? Such women would have been reluctant to wear the mini skirt for fear of mockery or disapproval, a factor which hadn’t applied during earlier times when skirt styles were more voluminous and hid a multitude of unfavourable characteristics. And so I’m tempted to speculate that this might have been the beginning of what today we call ‘body shaming’ with all its detrimental psychological consequences. It would be foolish to claim that it was the only cause, but I suggest it might have been the beginning.

Of course, I don’t intend any denigration of Mary Quant in saying this. Innovations are just innovations. Most of them have a good side and a bad side, and innovation is integral to human development. It’s just that I can’t help trying to see balance wherever balance is appropriate.