Fashion designer Dame Mary Quant has died aged 93, her family has announced.
Image source, PA MediaFashion designer Dame Mary Quant has died aged 93, her family has announced.
A statement from her family to the PA news agency said she “died peacefully at home in Surrey, UK this morning”.
Dame Mary was credited with designing the mini-skirts that helped define the Swinging 60s.
Her family said she was “one of the most internationally recognised fashion designers of the 20th Century and an outstanding innovator”.
“She opened her first shop Bazaar in the Kings Road in 1955 and her far-sighted and creative talents quickly established a unique contribution to British fashion.”
Former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman led the tributes on social media, tweeting: “RIP Dame Mary Quant. A leader of fashion but also in female entrepreneurship – a visionary who was much more than a great haircut.”
The Victoria & Albert Museum said: “It’s impossible to overstate Quant’s contribution to fashion. She represented the joyful freedom of 1960s fashion, and provided a new role model for young women.
“Fashion today owes so much to her trailblazing vision.”
Image source, PA Media
Dame Mary was one of the most influential figures in the fashion scene of the 1960s and is credited with making fashion accessible to the masses with her sleek, streamlined and vibrant designs.
Born in south-east London on 11 February 1930, Dame Mary was the daughter of two Welsh school teachers.
She gained a diploma in the 1950s in art education at Goldsmiths College, where she met her husband Alexander Plunket Greene, who later helped establish her brand.
Dame Mary was taken on as an apprentice to a milliner before making her own clothes and in 1955 opened Bazaar, a boutique on the Kings Road in Chelsea.
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