Mary Quant - Quant by Quant Book

To Tony Quant

Quant by Quant

Contents

Foreword

Quant by Quant

List of Illustrations

Index

Foreword

Looking at Quant by Quant again I am amazed by how so many of my embarrassments, failures or disasters have pushed me in a slightly different direction, or towards a new way of simply dealing with it and recovering myself, that it almost seems like a formula for getting there wherever there is. I hope others can laugh and find solace in this.

I realize how lucky I have been, but on the other hand at the time I kept thinking I cant write off yet another disaster or failure. But life is like that never give up or despair there are so many routes and directions. I am stunned to see in retrospect how hard I worked, and thrilled to know how much I enjoyed it. Work is more fun than fun.

I have been badly clobbered at work several times now, but I still admit to having had a most wonderful life. Perhaps this is the way life always is, but I dont think so. I just think my life has been wonderful and how lucky I am. And can I have it all over again please?

I find spring often disappoints and lets one down, but autumn is always stunningly beautiful and delicious with all the best to see, taste, smell and be. So I hope that goes on longer and longer and longer.

One nightingale arrived in England last spring, and sang his guts out for three-quarters of an hour. No one answered him so he gave up and went away. Thats it for nightingales it seems but we do have blackbirds and I can be happy with them. At least the French have the good sense to eat them as well nightingales and black birds. So if you dont get it one way you get it the other. The French would not live without a glass of wine and a good terrine.

Life as I know it now began for me when I first saw Plunket.

I had to wait three months before he noticed me and during that time I just watched from the outskirts of a posse of disciples who surrounded him constantly, hanging on his words, rushing about to fetch and carry for him and generally imitating his style.

I had been at the Goldsmiths College in south-east London for a few months when Plunket turned up, ostensibly to study Illustration although I should think the records of his attendance at classes must be unique because he never seemed to make an appearance until late in the afternoon.

Apparently he used Goldsmiths as a club and it was only when he was pushed and had nothing better to do that he turned up at all. So long as he dropped in and continued to be registered as a student, his mother gave him an allowance.

His arrival had an enormous effect on everybody. He really was quite something. To begin with, there was his appearance. He was very lean and long. He seemed to have no clothes of his own. He wore his mothers pyjama tops as shirts, generally in that colour known as old gold which usually comes as they say in the trade were now in in shantung.

His trousers also came out of his mothers wardrobe. Beautifully cut and very sleek fitting, the zip was at the side and they were in weird and wonderful variations of purple, prune, crimson and putty. The trouble was that they came to a stop half-way down the calf of the leg so there was always a wide gap of white flesh between the tops of the Chelsea-type boots he wore and the end of the trouser legs.

I found out later that the dramatic effect his appearance created on us at the College was absolutely unintentional. He did most of his growing between fifteen and sixteen when he suddenly shot up about six inches. His mother was ill at the time and she simply hadnt noticed.

Apart from the visual impact he made on us all, he also managed to create the impression that he was immensely rich. He lived in Chelsea; he had a house all to himself because his mother was convalescing in the country; he played jazz on the trumpet; was thought to take drugs; and boasted the wildest parties in London.

It must have been after one of these parties that he was seen to produce a five-pound note from his pocket... something enormously impressive. And he carried a film script around with the most important-looking cover... the words film script written all over it in the boldest, blackest, biggest type.

He was the most bizarre and worldly and advanced, fanciful and fantastic character I had ever dreamed of. I thought of him as a great film star, an impression heightened by these henchmen who were always with him and who could be heard saying, Yes, Plunket... No, Plunket... Can I get anything for you, Plunket?... Have you got your script, Plunket?... Hows it going, Plunket? The film script he carried around was Tom Browns Schooldays for which he had had a screen test and been short-listed. However, he did not get the part.

I never found the courage to speak to him and it wasnt until the Christmas Ball, a fancy dress affair rather like a smaller and more parochial version of the old Chelsea Arts Ball, at the end of his first term at Goldsmiths that he noticed me.

Because I was small, I had been stuck on top of a pile of balloons and, at midnight, practically naked, perched in the middle of hundreds of them, I was dragged round the dance floor on a float. I clutched an enormous bunch of balloons round my middle to disguise as much of myself as I could as I was rather fat.

This was the moment when Alexander says he first saw me. But, even then, he didnt speak. He was having a slightly unsatisfactory evening. He had arrived most immaculately dressed as Oscar Wilde, wearing a superb black frock-coat and carrying a single enormous lily. The trouble was that another student turned up as Lord Alfred Douglas. They were made to dance together all evening.

Having missed his chance to speak to me at the Goldsmiths hop, Alexander says now that he had to make a terrific effort at the beginning of the next term to pluck up the courage to accost me.

From the moment we did speak to each other, it was a whizz. We started doing everything together. I didnt give up all my old boy friends at once. It was simply that gradually they became obsolete. And the same sort of thing happened with Alexander.

When we first met he had a girl friend who was known as his fiance. They had been great friends during his last year at Bryanston. She was at the sister school, Critchell, and they had spent most of their last summer term together.

Bryanston is a sort of mock Eton except that the boys there seem to have an extraordinary amount of freedom. Alexander was supposed to be doing Art during his last year there but so far as I can make out his school attendances became simply a matter of clocking in at church once a week.

In spite of this, he is still very much in favour of a public school education as he says that if youre not very clever, you can get by better if youve either been to a public school or come from the East End.

Plunket used to make me frantically jealous by telling me how beautiful his fiance was... what a wonderful, bony face she had... the face of a great model, hed say. And how madly attractive he found her proud, sensitive nostrils. I said she looked like a horse in a panic!

Fortunately for me she grew in height even faster than Alexander and when they were both around fifteen, she was two inches taller than he was which didnt please him at all. By the time he had caught up and hit six foot two which happened within the next couple of years she was at university and he had become acclimatized to the mad world we managed to create at Goldsmiths.