How mini-skirts changed the world

A fashion buff in the 1960s, Mary Quant got her first taste of the fashion design life by trimming her grandmother's knee-length skirts. Then she took on the boutique, Bazaar, in London's Chelsea neighborhood, where sold her own tailor-made skirts. These were much shorter than the modest skirts her mother and grandmother had worn — ending at least ten centimeters above the knee. Outrageous!

"I liked my skirts short because I wanted to run and catch the bus for work," Quant once said. The young designer sold not only hip designs in her boutique, she changed the image of the young, modern woman forever with her mini-skirts. But she didn't stop at mini-skirts — always inventing new looks and trying out new materials, like PVC: "Fashion is a very ongoing, renewing thing," she said.

The mini skirt became a symbol of London's "Swinging Sixties." Twiggy, the young model with the thin legs, androgynous figure and pixie haircut, wore the short skirts on the catwalks of the world. Members of The Beatles also frequented Quant's boutique to find dresses for their girlfriends; the store was, at that time, on King's Road: the epi-center of "Swinging London."

Mary Quant never wanted to be the sole recipient of the fame her mini-skirt creation flamed. "The King's Road girls invented the mini-skirt. I had already made the skirts short, but the customers always wanted them shorter," she once said. Yet the style was christened mini, after Quant's preference for the car of the same name.

When the first young ladies stepped out in public wearing the short skirts, they were issued warnings by stern-faced police officers. Some even had to make sure that such a skirt length was allowed at all. The Vatican condemned the style as lewd, but Queen Elizabeth, seen here in 1965 on her visit to Germany, awarded Mary Quant a medal for her services to the fashion industry the following year.

The daring idea caught on among designers and the media took a fancy to it. In 1962, "Vogue" showed Quant's designs. By 1964, the mini-skirt had arrived in Germany; a year later, the trend had established itself worldwide. Yet it was not until the end of the 60s that such short skirts also appeared in the collections of renowned French fashion houses such as Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior.

The trend didn't end, even as Mary Quant discontinued her fashion line in 1969 to concentrate on a line of accessories, cosmetics and lingerie. She attributed her getting into the make-up business to an interest in designing "a complete look, from head to toe." Although the designer herself retired in 2000, the eponymous label is still around. Her contributions are on display in London's V&A.