The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced that it will be hosting a retrospective of the British designer Mary Quant’s work.
The exhibition, due to open in April 2019, will focus on Quant’s designs between 1955 and 1975, and will be the first international retrospective of the designer’s work in almost half a century.
With unprecedented access to Quant’s fashion archive, the display will bring together over 200 objects, many of which have never been on public display.
One of Britain’s most influential designers, Quant is famous for her bright, playful clothes that sparked a movement marked by a youthful change in fashion.
Quant had no formal design training, but her understanding of what young women wanted to wear was enough to turn her into a fashion mogul. Making A-line shiftdresses with little Peter Pan collars and teaming them with knee-length boots and coloured tights, Quant’s young style was popularised by celebrities and models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton.
But it was the miniskirt for which Quant’s reign is remembered. Trialling different hemlines in the early 1960s, the designer eventually settled on the thigh-high mini. A debate continues to rage over which designer actually invented the miniskirt (many say it was the Parisian André Courrèges) but what is undisputed is that it was Quant who popularised it.
In an early example of bubble up fashion trends, micro hemlines were adopted on the runways of designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin.
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