On April 13th 2023 the world lost a person that revolutioned the fashion industry and changed forever the way girls dressed. Her name was Mary Quant and she is known as the creator of the miniskirt. It is hard to believe that when girls are choosing what to wear for a night out, in their closet there will always be a miniskirt! Some people might think that after all a miniskirt is just a piece of cloth or an ordinary skirt but shorter. However, the truth is that its invention has become a symbol of women’s freedom, femininity and feminism.

To understand how its creation occurred we have to take a step back and jump into the life of Mary Quant. It all started when her husband, Alexander Plunket Greene and her decided to buy a block of flats in King’s Road in Chelsea and put up a boutique called ‘Bazaar’ at the ground floor of the building. In the beginning she would buy wholesale clothes, but she was disappointed with what the market offered, so thanks to her talent, she decided to create new clothes for her clients. Many people may think that she studied to do what shed did when in reality she was self-taught and she would follow night courses to learn how to cut and shape fabric. The money she would gain from the purchases at the boutique in the morning was used to create new fabrics at night and this soon brought Mary to great results that led to a different and informal way of shopping, with unique pieces of clothing and accesible prices.

It was 1963 when the miniskirt appeared for the first time in the window shop where it was created, Bazaar. Mary used to say that a dress was supposed to capture other people’s attention, to make you look sexy and feel good in your own skin. All these qualities perfectly describe her and her creation and at the same time they reveal her revolutionary spirit, her desire to change forever the way girls dressed and her longing of freedom. Of course the above-the-knee skirt was criticised just like every new invention that is against the ordinary and introduces something extraordinay, but the miniskirt became the emblem of the revolution of an entire generation of women. The miniskirt was permanently introduced in 1966 after other models of skirts that were progressively shorter and shorter that she had experimented since 1962. She also opened a second shop in Brompton Road at Knightsbridge and in 1963 she launched the Ginger Group Line in order to export her items in the States. Mary Quant herself wore the miniskirt at Buckingham Palace when she received from the Queen The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contribution to the world of fashion.

In spite of being credited with creating the miniskirt, there’s been a controversy between Mary Quant and Andre Courrèges about who invented it. However Mary Quant always insisted and claimed: “It wasn’t me or Courrèges who invented the miniskirt anyway. It was the girls in the street who did it”.

Her muse was a 17-year-old hairdresser, Leslie Honrby, named Twiggy, but also other famous women like Jackie Kennedy and Brigitte Bardot started to wear the miniskirt.

Among Quant’s inventions the miniskirt is by far the most famous one, but we can’t forget to mention the hot pants, the skinny rib sweater that was invented as a joke because she tried on a 8-year-old kid’s pullover and the booby trap, a bra without stitching.

Needless to say that towards the end of the 60s she reachead the peak of success and it was said that more than seven millon of women had at least one of her creations in their closet. Stylist, designer, entrepreneur, with her brilliant talent she opened the doors to a cultural shift towars informality and the break down of social codes. Her role in the history of fashion and the big revolutions she brought collide with women’s empowerment.