Monocled Alchemist

Article from Intro magazine: 7th October 1967

Mary Quant fashion empire: Mary Quant, O.B.E., has been famous for thirteen years. She’s the figurehead of a vast organisation. She’s a myth, a legend, a household word, an international celebrity.

All this makes an enormously important-seeming façade, but what’s Mary Quant really doing, thinking, producing behind it?

There’s plenty of praise for each new thing she does, but there have been criticisms too. After thirteen years of taking her for granted as a fashion great, what’s in the Quant phenomenon?

We went to see her at her Chelsea flat. Alexander Plunket Greene had arrived early and dispensed graceful hospitality while we waited for his wife to come home from work.

There was a little scratching of a key at the door, and in came Mary Quant: no Batmobile entrance of noise and personality plus, just a small, precise figure coming quietly home.

Mary Quant fashion empire

She’s thirty-three years, seven months old this week, and in her short, skimpy jersey dress, looks a wise seventeen year old.

She pours herself some fizzy white wine, enquiring why don’t we try it, it’s delicious? hooks a long slim leg over the arm of a scarlet leather sofa, and talks.

‘‘Yes, it’s a long time since it all started. But time doesn’t matter, it’s just a statistic. It’s what you’re doing at the moment that matters. If you like it, then you don’t stop to think how long you’ve been doing it; you’re interested in what you’re doing now and what you can do next.”’

She tips her head sideways, considering. Her hair is home-shampoo-clean, raggedy at the neck. Her dress is casually unbuttoned way down the neck revealing a freckly chest. She talks in a soft, polite voice, but emphatically.

‘‘Sometimes I want to stop—well—sometimes I don’t want to go on. Sometimes I suddenly feel I have too much to do, like, say I feel rotten, headached and stomached and the lot.

Then I get furious; I yell at Alexander and Archie (chairman of the company) and say they’re exploiting me. But it’s my own fault I have so much to do. Always.”’

Talks staccato-style

She talks in staccato sentences, reserved and quiet, then winds up for a longer, exhibitionist description of something. “You know, I’ll say to Archie: ‘Oh, I so want to do this completely new thing . . . . And he says (she puts on a business voice): ‘But we agreed we weren’t going to take on any more.’ And I say: ‘Oh, but I’ve always wanted to do this!’

You know, sleepwear or something. And I persuade them. So I always have to remember it’s my fault I do so much.

“You see, that’s the way I work. I see things I don’t like and want to make them nicer. I can’t do it for everything: like, I wouldn’t know how to design a chair.

Mary Quant fashion empire

But anything that touches me personally, I mean make-up, underwear, shoes and so on, well, I get mad at them if they don’t work, or they don’t look nice, or they have some silly little fault. It seems so simple to put it right, so, of course, I try to do it.”’

She hooks her other leg over the sofa and yanks at her strawberry and beige dress, which immediately retreats seven inches up her legs.

“I like being this age because I’m happy now and I wasn’t so happy when I was younger. Some people criticize what I do. They say I’ve never been so good as I was at the beginning. You see, the trouble for me, really, is having been so new at first.

People want to go on experiencing that same impact. l’ve worked this out and I try not to get bothered by the criticisms. But a while back, I got so worried that I was in a cold sweat.

So what I did, I looked back at my early collections (long bodices ending in lampshade frills, princess line dresses with fluted collars, leather bermuda shorts, etc.), and mentally redrew them as they’d be today.

Well, maybe three or four I could say, yes, a good design. But that’s a pretty low average. I do better now.”

World-wide business

She is jumpy, definite. “I think I’d only go bad 1 went dead. As a person. If I stopped enjoying designing.”

There seems to be no thought at all of the Quant phenomenon coming to an end.

And when you think of twenty-two collections on average each year, for sale in forty-two countries, and the different industries from cosmetics to waterproof boots relying on her designs, you realize how much momentum they’ve built up, and how difficult it would be to jump out.

Alexander talks of getting a house in London with a big garden, and mentions how much they’d like to live in France “because,” Mary breaks in, ‘“‘we’re such pigs about eating; we love eating.”

Mary Quant’s life is going on evenly, but it’s at a pace and at a level of responsibility which would frighten the daylights out of most of us.

How strenuous is it? She makes light of it: tells how she has long weekends instead of normal holidays. If they go abroad, they fix work to end on Friday, then stay over till Monday to see a bit of the place.

No stopping now

“And it’s nice being able to get up late: often we don’t go out till ten. Most days, Archie, Alexander and I go and have long lunches . . . we talk about work, yes, but it’s nice and relaxed.” She disposes of the subject.

It’s so obvious to her that she can’t stop the Quant world and get off, that she doesn’t entertain the thought for a moment. She’s more interested in her laziness, her inability to work except to a deadline.

Does she ever feel she couldn’t stand the sight of another dress? ‘‘Oh, gosh yes. But I’m clever with myself. I pull tricks on myself. Yes! They work, too!

“What I do, well, sometimes I go off to a hotel and work in a room with completely plain white walls and nothing to distract me. Or I fly off to Paris and lock myself in a room, and then there’s no telephone or anything. So I just have to work.

Mary Quant fashion empire

“Sometimes I have to do one thing, like maybe swimsuits, when all I want to do is maybe ski clothes. I sit down and realize, dammit, that’s what I want to do.

So I do it anyway, then convert them. It works!” She is delighted.

“Really it does! I’ve converted ski clothes into bathing costumes, nightdresses into dresses, oh, lots of things.

‘‘Sometimes it’s like physical torture, knowing you have to sit down and work. That’s why I need these tricks, to deceive myself into starting, because once I do, everything starts happening.”

She kicks off her shoes, and hikes off into the kitchen barefoot for some more chilled white wine.

We look round the enormous living-room, three rooms knocked into one with long windows down one side. It’s painted a putty-coloured high-gloss, there are black and white Spanish rugs and a long, pine refectory table.

Mary likes things

Everything else provides splodges of colour: the two scarlet leather sofas; the shiny brass theodolite next to a group of experimental lip-sticks; the rainbow cluster of magic marker pens next to the sketch blocks; the swatches of material and the mug of sharpened pencils on the table.

A brief crimson sweater is folded over the back of a rush-seated chair; there are piles of glossy black and white photographs of next spring’s collections on the platform at the end of the room. Mary Quant, obviously, likes things.

When she discovers something she likes, she wants everyone to share in the find. She comes back with the wine, tells us about it, what it is, where to get it.

She likes everything around her to be as super, exciting and stimulating as possible, and loves to pass on her finds.

‘‘This is the best thing I can do, trying to find things for people to enjoy. I think people today really are happier because they have nice clothes they feel confident and gay in.

If lots of super clothes are available, then it’s easy for a girl to be pretty, and when you know you’re looking great, this frees you to do things.”’

She toboggans down the side of the sofa and chooses a fat white French cigarette, smoking it in the middle of her mouth, laughing and puffing amateurishly.

She’s thirty-three. In about another fifteen years maybe she’ll seem to be so.