MARY Quant was a household name in the 60s. The designer defined 60’s fashion becoming part of what has been dubbed as the Swinging Sixties.
In Zambia, Mary Quant, who was born on February 11, 1934 was synonymous with fashion itself.
The designer is a Welsh designer and British fashion icon.
She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements. She was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hot pants, and by promoting these and other fun fashions she encouraged young people to dress to please themselves and to treat fashion as a game.
Ernestine Carter, an authoritative and influential fashion journalist of the 1950s/60s, wrote: “It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior, and Mary Quant.’’
Mary Quant and the Miniskirt.
The miniskirt, described as one of the defining fashions of the 1960s, is one of the garments most widely associated with Quant.
In Zambia, the miniskirt challenged traditional norms of women fashion revolutionising dressing that was frowned about by convetionalists by welcomed by fashion-conscious young women.
It prompted Yandikani Lungu to sing a song entitled Miniskir helping with the campaign by the UNIP women group to call for the ban of the offensive dress.
Whilst Mary Quant is often cited as the inventor of the style, this claim has been challenged by others. Marit Allen, a contemporary fashion journalist and editor of the influential “Young Ideas” pages for UK Vogue, firmly stated that John Bates, rather than Quant or André Courrèges, was the original creator of the miniskirt.
Others credit Courrèges with the invention of the style. However, skirts had been getting shorter since the 1950s—a development Quant considered practical and liberating, allowing women the ability to run for a bus.
Quant later said “It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the mini. I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes, in which you could move, in which you could run and jump and we would make them the length the customer wanted.
I wore them very short and the customers would say, ‘Shorter, shorter.’”  She gave the miniskirt its name, naming it after her favourite make of car, the Mini, and said of its wearers, “they are curiously feminine, but their femininity lies in their attitude rather than in their appearance … She enjoys being noticed, but wittily. She is lively—positive—opinionated.”
In addition to the miniskirt, Quant is often credited with inventing the coloured and patterned tights that tended to accompany the garment, although their creation is also attributed to the Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga who offered harlequin-patterned tights in 1962 or to John Bates.