Harrods, for example, was a stolid world of hats, gloves, and demure cream teas. “If you think about the way shopping occurred before then, it was a very formal kind of experience,” says Cox. The survey begins in 1955 with Quant’s first London boutique, Bazaar, which was something of a phenomenon. Woven throughout the exhibition are stories, photographs and clothing from the millions of women who adopted Quant’s groundbreaking designs and made them their own. “She was female, she was young she represented the triumph of youth and freedom,” says Bendigo Art Gallery curator Emma Busowsky Cox. Originally staged at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A), and now travelling to Bendigo, Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary is a major survey of Quant’s remarkable career that radiates the designer’s buoyant personality. Kellie Wilson and model wearing minidress and matching shorts by Mary Quant, 1966. “I didn’t have time to wait for women’s lib,” she later said. Characterising 1950s Britain as “railway stations and Typhoo tea, stockings and suspenders,” Quant led a revolution in colour, style and comfort. Championing “relaxed clothes, suited to the actions of normal life,” Quant is widely accepted as popularising the miniskirt and revitalising women’s dress. Fashion would never be the same.Īt the helm of this global movement was British designer Mary Quant. By the time the 1966 Flemington Races rolled around, hats and gloves had been tossed away, and hemlines had risen even higher. Eschewing the compulsory hat, gloves and stockings, Shrimpton’s free and easy appearance was a revelation, and Australian women embraced it swiftly. A simple white shift, hemline just above the knee, the dress appears laughably demure to contemporary eyes-but it was a clarion call of liberation to young Australian women, stifled by the stuffy conventions of the era. Photographs of her scandalous outfit hit the front pages. In 1965, English model Jean Shrimpton wore a minidress to the Melbourne Spring Races and caused a sensation.
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