She was inspired by pop art, the music scene and the ‘Chelsea Set’ of artists, socialites and film makers that were convening around the Kings Road. Quant’s designs were riskier than standard styles of the time with a daring array of colours and patterns. In her boutique she created a special environment with music, drinks, and long hours that appealed to a young audience who were embracing the cultural shift away from the late 1950s. It was unique for the industry, where most fashionable clothes were bought from stale department stores or inaccessible expensive designer boutiques. 

The connection between fashion and pop art has largely been overlooked, but Quant was highly influential, designing clothes as a weapon in sexual politics, she claimed that: “My designs gave women courage – courage to be livelier, more extrovert, more daring, more original.” She was effectively attempting to lift the lid of societal expectations and let women be free to be their true selves. This link between music, art and fashion became even more obvious with the dawn of punk decades later. 

It is claimed that Quant invented the miniskirt around 1965. This was not strictly true. Skirts had been getting shorter since the 1950s, and had reached the knee by the early 1960s, as Quant later said: “It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the miniskirt. 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 did give the style its name though, after her favourite make of car, the Mini. 

Quant became the most iconic fashion designer of the 1960s. She was a design and retail pioneer, popularising high hemlines and other irreverent looks that were critical to the development of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ scene. She died at home in Surrey in 2023, aged 93.

You can still buy clothes and make-up from the store that bears here name here.