From the Archives, 1972: The ‘very ordinary’ Mary Quant

She wore a short blue dress with huge, puffed sleeves and strappy platform shoes in cream.

“She’s very ordinary, isn’t she?” said a woman at the back of the crowd. It seemed an odd way to describe the girl who revolutionised fashion in the 1960s, but you could see what she meant.

In the nicest possible way, Mary Quant is ordinary – she comes across as a very natural, friendly, touchable person, and she still looks very much like a schoolgirl.

As she said just before she left for lunch: “I think I was born never wanting to grow up… I just didn’t like wearing grown-up clothes.”

MARY QUANT IS GROWN UP NOW…
The girl who started a revolution
October 8

“It’s all right to be grown up again,” says Mary Quant. “People have got tired of dressing up like little girls. Now it’s even all right not to look totally destitute!”

Her spring range will be made up of what she describes as “modern classics,” in suitings, Viyellas, flannels and Liberty prints.

But Australians will not see much of it. This is because of the problems of having things made abroad under licence.

“We would have to come here to work on each collection,” she said.

Although Mary Quant cosmetics are available in 98 different countries, only very limited ranges of her clothes can be sent overseas.

Miss Quant and her Australian counterpart, Prue Acton, met in Melbourne for drinks. Not to her surprise, Mary learned that Prue has to travel often to Hong Kong and Japan to supervise her collections there.

If there is such a thing as a philosophy of fashion, Miss Quant has it. She will not send a collection to a manufacturer and say: “Copy it.” She believes make-up should look natural and soft, and she finds the perfect-in-every detail look: (as achieved by international jet-setting women), boring.

Her husband, Mr Alexander Plunket – Greene, thoroughly agrees with her.

At their press conference at the Chevron Hotel yesterday, he said:

“Whenever I hear people say: ‘You wouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole/ I think of the rich international jetset, not of grubby little girls.”

For several years, the Plunket-Greenes have been “getting away from it all” on their farm, one and a-half hours’ drive south of London. During the week, they live in Chelsea, in a “five or six storey, tall and thin,” house. They have help in the house and a nanny for their three year-old son, Orlando. But at weekends, they send the nanny home so that they can have Orlando all to themselves.

Orlando is travelling with them on their current tour of Japan, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. During the trip, they have given in gracefully to everyone’s curiosity about their son. But at home they have a firm rule that Orlando will be kept, as far as possible, out of the public eye.

“The British public are very good about leaving you alone,” said Alexander. “Even at the time she got her OBE, Mary could go anywhere she liked without people bothering her.”

Alexander says that he fears everything for his son—heights, aeroplanes (of which he is nervous himself) and most of all, the danger of Orlando’s becoming “a kind of infant celebrity.”

So, although his wife designs hosiery, knitwear, sunglasses and spectacle frames, clothes, make-up, shoes, jewellery and even textiles, she does not design babies’ clothes.

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“I know Mary would love to,” said her husband, “but we would hate Orlando to become a walking advertisement for Mary Quant babywear.

She does not design clothes for pre-teenagers, either. This, Alexander describes as “a sound bit of psychology.

“If children have been wearing Mary’s thing for years,” he explains, “they’re going to want to out-grow them when they become teenagers.”

With the slender plaid suit and cream crepe-de-chine suit which Miss Quant wore, she sported a pair of crimson suede sandals with high cork platform soles.

They were Italian, acquired in Tokyo.

“Mary admired them,” said Alexander, “and the Japanese, being what they are, insisted that she accept them as a gift.”