In fashion, a few centimeters mean the world. Exactly four are between the different sizes in width. But one is less precise when it comes to the length: A sleeve, a pair of trousers, a little too short, a little too long, could also be meant that way.
With skirts, however, length has always been serious. Not so long ago, showing ankles was unthinkable. And when it became conceivable to show ankles, the taboo shifted to the calves. And when it came to the knee, everyone agreed for a long time: not about that.
From now on: always above the knee!
Knees are an unsightly part of the body, like all joints, said none other than Coco Chanel and spoke vehemently against showing them. The fashion designer, of all people, who brought women a previously unknown freedom with wide trousers, jersey sweaters and little black dresses, became demure in old age in view of the fashion that developed around her in the 1960s. Karl Lagerfeld would later call it “one of their biggest mistakes”.
Mary Quant
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Image: AP
Because a British designer decided in that decade: from now on always above the knee – and a good ten centimeters at that. Mary Quant was then in her early thirties and already a fixture in the London avant-garde. The daughter of Welsh teachers, she wanted to be a fashion designer from an early age.
Her parents were skeptical, they didn’t want to let her go to Paris. So she studied illustration and art in London, which turned out to be a better way: Because not the French, but the British capital was to become the stronghold of pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s.
“The miniskirt was a rebellion”
Together with her husband Alexander Plunket Greene and her friend Archie McNair, Quant opened “Bazaar” on the King’s Road, a boutique that today might be called a “concept store”. In addition to clothes, there were cosmetics, records and books to buy. And in the basement a bar, where the “Chelsea Set” met – beautiful, young people from the pop scene, who disputed the status of the British upper class with their cultural capital and wealth of style.
Quant, who had previously worked at a milliner and knew how to make patterns, began selling her own designs at the Bazaar. “The miniskirt was a rebellion,” she once said, and perhaps this is the answer to why she and not André Courrèges is considered the inventor of the short skirt. Courrèges had been playing with hem lengths since the early 1960s and established this shorter length in Paris; the “Courrèges effect” also inspired Yves Saint Laurent and Cristóbal Balenciaga to shorten their skirts and dresses.
Ideal image of androgynous femininity: the model Twiggy, 1970
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Image: dpa
However, Courrèges was aimed at wealthy Parisian women – Quant, with its ready-to-wear fashion, at London youth. An Englishwoman who loaned one of her dresses to the Victoria & Albert Museum for the retrospective three years ago gushed: “Mary Quant embodied a style that defied the norm. That meant we teenagers didn’t have to look like our mothers.” Dresses were meant to be short and comfortable, and Quant used fabric that Chanel also used: wool jersey. The name “Mini” is said to be inspired by the car of the same name.