Saying goodbye to this world at the age of 93, in peace and having been a legend: it doesn’t seem like bad luggage. I am referring to the British fashion designer Mary Quant, who died this Thursday, who sensed the cultural revolution of the 1960s and transferred it to fashion. If the beatles they wrote the soundtrack of that time, she designed the costumes, at least in the call swinging london. Here, in the technocratic Franco regime, the Palomares bombs, the lyrics on television and the ‘dictum’ of the Sevillana that popularized manolo escobar that of the bulls and the miniskirt, a garment whose invention was disputed by the French Andre Courreges. In any case, it was Mary Quant who put it in the closets and on the street.
He didn’t just shorten the skirts. She knew how to instill a certain sense of freedom, physical and mental, in her bob haircut, PVC raincoats, shorts and skinny jeans. Heir to Coco Chanel, he created designs for a new generation of young women, with jobs, income and access to the contraceptive pill, women who competed for life outside the home. You can’t catch a rushing bus stuck in a pencil skirt, or drive a Lambretta in starched petticoats. Her colored stockings were intended to leave behind the grayness of the postwar period. Curiously, Mary Quant opened her first London store, Bazaar, in 1955, just a year after rationing ended in Britain. A new energy vibrated in the air and she knew how to capture it like no one else.
‘Quiet luxury’
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Meanwhile, I read in fashion magazines that, in this era of various dislocations, what is worn among the rich is ‘quiet luxury’, ‘silent luxury’. No loud tones or flashy logos. If the 60s were a roar, now the ‘in’ goes through textile austerity, investment in quality pieces and thoughtful purchasing, in keeping with the ‘zeitgeist’, the spirit of the times. In other words, a white shirt, jeans and good leather shoes, polished a thousand times. For those who can afford a very ‘rututú’ bag, theirs is that the accessory looks very trodden, as if the grandmother had bequeathed it in her will.
I don’t know if it is a natural tendency, a new lifestyle, or a clever move by the industry to whiten, the ‘fashion-washing’. I seem to be hearing my mother’s voice, and paying attention to her: «A single jacket but that it is made of good cloth, for life». The shroud coat But it sounds reasonable to return to the habits of other times, especially when you think that To make a pair of jeans, about 7,500 liters of water are required.