Mary Quant

Mary Quant turned the King’s Road into the place to be young in 1960s London. In 1955 she opened Bazaar there with her future husband Alexander Plunket Greene and Archie McNair, a shop people visited for the music and late hours as much as the clothes. She had studied illustration at Goldsmiths, not fashion. When the wholesalers did not have what she wanted, she started designing it herself.

Her skirts kept getting shorter. She wanted them easy to move in, short enough to run for a bus. She named the miniskirt after her favourite car, the Mini. Who invented it is still argued over: André Courrèges and John Bates are also credited. Quant gave the credit to the girls on the King’s Road, who wanted their skirts ever shorter.

In 1963 she launched the Ginger Group, a cheaper line for the mass market. The PVC raincoat followed in 1964, then hot pants later in the decade. When she collected her OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1966, she wore a cream wool jersey minidress.

To get a feel for her work, look at fashion photographs from those years: straight shapes, flat colour, patterned tights, plastic. Later she moved into make-up and homeware. The Victoria and Albert Museum gave her a major exhibition in 2019. She died at home in Surrey on 13 April 2023, aged 93.