If you close your eyes and conjure a vision of the stereotyped feminist, she’s probably in baggy dungarees, flexing her bicep with a handkerchief about her head. Or perhaps she’s wearing a pair of loose jeans and Doc Martens, dangling a blazing bra in her hand? Whatever you imagine, she’s probably not wearing a miniskirt, is she? And yet, for a spell in the Swinging Sixties, she most certainly was.
Inspired by the young women around her in London’s trendy Chelsea, Mary Quant began experimenting with hemlines in the early 1960s, rolling skirts at the waist and chopping them short. By 1964, she had created the thigh-grazing mini, so named after her favourite car. She had no formal design training and scant knowledge of how to run a business, but what she did have was a sense of what young women wanted.
“From the very start, customers were four-deep outside the window,” Quant recalls in the Mail Online. “Within ten days, we hardly had a piece of the original merchandise left.”
Whilst the debate over who first invented the garment rages on among the fashion set (the French credit André Courrèges for first daring to raise hemlines quite that high), it was undoubtedly Quant who commercialised the mini and brought it to the masses. Sold at her King’s Road boutique, Bazaar, Quant’s mini was simple and playful, modelled in bright fabrics with coloured tights, knee-high boots and Peter Pan collars. It was affordable and easy to wear; a youthful look signifying an energetic innocence that belied its rebelliousness. When adopted by gamine model-of-the-moment Twiggy, it was embraced wholeheartedly by the daring fashion-conscious.
The skirt sent shockwaves through society, with many dubbing it vulgar. Even Chanel questioned: ‘Have they all gone mad?’ in the New York Times in 1965 (her hemlines always remained safely below the knee). Soon enough, though, the trend bubbled up from the streets and savvy designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin caught on, designing their own even shorter versions, the micro-mini.
The mini’s meteoric rise coincided with the nascent women’s movement of the era. Commercial availability of the pill in 1961 encouraged sexual liberation and the miniskirt was the symbol of the movement, worn by feminist frontrunners such as Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem.
“It was a sign of a new attitude for those who wore it,” says Rebecca Arnold, professor of dress and textiles at the Courtauld Institute of Art. “It symbolised to those around them that times were changing and women were active and visible.” So aligned with women’s lib was mini that when Dior showed longer hemlines in 1966, a group calling themselves the ‘British Society for the Protection of Mini Skirts’, protested outside his show.
Above all, the mini was comfortable. It liberated the female form from the cinched, waspish waists and bell skirts of the 1950s. “Designers like Quant rejected the stiff, constricting styles and undergarments of previous decades in favour of looser mini skirts and dresses,” says Emma McClendon, Associate Curator of Costume at The Museum at FIT.
It was perfect for the Swinging Sixties. But despite its feminist allegiance, the mini celebrated only certain women. “The ideal physique to wear the new mini styles was very young and very thin, which gave rise to dieting culture,” says McClendon, whose current exhibition ‘The Body: Fashion and Physique,’ explores this phenomenon. “Women were increasingly expected to obtain and maintain a fashionable physique.”
The reign of the mini came to an end with the 1970s and the prevailing trend for flowing hippie skirts and flares. In the 1980s it re-emerged in power suits as women broke into the boardroom, and was later embraced by the Spice Girls’ brand of girl power feminism.
Today, that rebellious hemline has found a new cause in the body positive movement, embracing women of all shapes and ages who wear what they choose. “Wearing whatever you want is a sort of feminist statement in itself, whether that’s a mini skirt or a maxi skirt,” says model and ‘Self-love Brings Beauty’ founder, Felicity Hayward. “Previous beauty standards are to be firmly ignored.”
From a teenage trend to a political statement and a wardrobe classic. That’s quite something for a scandalously small cut of cloth.
