She saw fashion as a powerful tool for getting through life. It could be a disguise, or it could be a bold announcement of things to come
Wearing it, over a polo-neck and contrasting tights , made you feel different. You were not a version of your mother any more. You were modern. Even more so when you plastered down your hair with spray, framed your eyes with kohl and piled on the mascara. High boots, if you had them, perfected the look. Now you could stride.
She also sold mini-skirts. They went like wildfire, getting ever shorter because her leggy Chelsea customers demanded it. She designed them long before André Courrèges, in his Paris show in 1964, made them respectable. They were not respectable with her. Wickedly, they teased men, as did her long cardigans worn as very short dresses, and in 1966 her crutch-hugging minipants.
This was also serious stuff, for her. She was shy, and always had been, but through clothes she could express herself. Already, at six, she was making her own dresses out of bedspreads. At school she recast her uniform. The Quant look came from a tap-dancer at her childhood ballet class who wore a long black jumper, black tights, white socks and no skirt to speak of; she liked skinny, lively monochrome ever after.
That love affair too had been made by fashion, when Alexander wandered into classes at Goldsmiths in his mother’s gold silk pyjamas. For both of them, eccentric dressing was a powerful tool for getting through life. It could be a disguise, and her range of cosmetics, with colours as vivid as her clothes, were really pots of theatrical paint made tiny for a handbag. Or it could be a bold announcement of things to come.
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