![]() ![]() ![]() It’s the glimpses of fashion as it was lived that make up the best bits of this show: the donors’ testaments, as well as the projections of TV documentaries and newsreels portraying Quant at work, her revolutionary shows with girls dancing, pop groups playing, and American store buyers going crazy. And there’s nothing to place Quant and London in the contexts of pop music, sexual politics, and public events-which is a shame because the V&A has all that surrounding contemporary material stored away in its archives. There’s little inquiry into how Quant so brilliantly came up with her daisy logo, basically writing the template for how fashion branding and marketing are done to this day. There’s a lot to be gleaned by fashion geeks in terms of the clothes-how well made they were in the early days how Quant drew up liberating solutions like tights, matching dress-and-knickers sets, and stretchy underwear for fearless girls who wanted to wear sky-high hemlines. All a designer can do is to anticipate a mood before people realize they’re bored with what they’ve already got.” But, in fact, no one designer is ever responsible for such a revolution. “Over and again I was told I was responsible for the offbeat clothes that became known as the Chelsea Look. She saw the creative backlash against bouffants, waspies, and “mother knows best” as actioned by the girls around her, as she insisted in her book Quant by Quant, written even as the runaway success of her tiny Bazaar store had bloomed into an empire with 150 stockists and her massive fame had been amplified across America. Quant might go down in history as the girl who “invented” the miniskirt, but she, for one, resisted that tag from as far back as 1965. On one side, there’s the Christian Dior extravaganza-the smash-hit showcasing of the dreamy, romantic, corseted haute couture of the ’50s-and on the other now comes the complete generational rejection of it, which Quant led in the ’60s. As the Mary Quant exhibition opens tomorrow at the V&A, it’s pretty much as if the cause and effect of a London youth revolt is being reenacted under one roof. ![]()
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