Fashion
designer Mary Quant, who is widely credited with creating the mini skirt, has
spoken of her delight at being made a Dame.
The
80-year-old, listed on Cabinet Office documents under her full name Barbara
Mary Plunket Greene, was given the honour for services to British fashion in
the Queen’s New Year Honours list.
She said:
“I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded this terrific honour.
“It is
extremely gratifying that my work in the fashion industry has been recognised
and acknowledged in such a significant way.”
Dame Mary,
who lives at Farley Green, near Peaslake, was one of the most influential
figures in the fashion scene of the 1960s.
She began
experimenting with shorter hemlines in the late 1950s, culminating in the
creation of one of the defining fashions of the following decade.
Earlier
this year Dame Mary, who named the skirt after her favourite make of car,
recalled its “feeling of freedom and liberation”.
She said:
“It was the girls on [London’s] King’s Road who invented the mini. I was making
clothes which would let you run and dance, and we would make them the length
the customer wanted.
“I wore
them very short and the customers would say, ‘shorter, shorter’.”
Born in
south-east London, Mary Quant was the daughter of two Welsh school teachers.
She gained a diploma in Art Education at Goldsmith’s College, where she met her
husband Alexander Plunket Greene, before she was taken on as an apprentice to a
milliner.
She began
making her own clothes and in 1955 opened Bazaar, a boutique on the King’s Road
in Chelsea.
Her
Damehood comes almost 50 years after she was appointed an OBE in 1966.
No comments:
Post a Comment