Mary Quant: Not Just A Fashion Influencer

Now it’s rare that I stray from the path of interiors but I hope you will forgive me this one-off indulgence. Last week I was invited to the preview of a new exhibition at the V&A museum – the first ever retrospective on the fashion designer Mary Quant.

image courtesy of the V&A Museum

Yes it’s fashion, but Quant, now 89 and a Dame, was so enormously influential in so many fields -  she not only revolutionised the high street (and most high street fashion stores now sell homewares but her pioneering attitude and challenge the social mores of the period as well as being central to that period in the 60s when London, or more precisely Chelsea, wasn’t just a place but an attitude. A time when Terence Conran opened the first Habitat and Zev Aram, set up the first Aram store nearby. Zeev told me years ago that people would come into the store and berate him for its ugliness - read modernity.