Mary Quant - revisited

At our April meeting we welcomed 4 visitors, we hope they enjoyed the evening and will come back next month. After singing Jerusalem, our speaker Ruth Lowe was introduced, to give the second part of her Mary Quant talk.


Ruth has had a very busy few months, meetings with the V&A museum in London regarding their Mary Quant exhibition and also appearing on The One Show. She gave a brief resume of her first talk, for the benefit of those who had missed it. She described how the first boutique had opened in 1955 and the company had grown very quickly. Mary had become a millionaire by 1962 and had gone into mass production in 1963 after breaking into the American market.


In 1988, Quant designed the interior of the Mini 1000 Designer. Ruth is a very proud owner of one of these vehicles. The car featured black and white striped seats with red trimming, seatbelts were red, and the driving and passenger seats had Quant’s signature. Mary Quant's signature daisy appeared on the steering wheel and the car featured other design finishes.

Mary was the first to design makeup for men and women’s makeup was put into palettes of complimentary colours. She designed the uniform for BOAC, later to become BA, and the uniforms for the Terence Conran store Habitat.

Mary was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hotpants, she encouraged young people to dress to please themselves, and her philosophy was that clothes should be easy to wear. She never conformed, often mixing spots and stripes, to great effect. Ruth has very kindly loaned the V&A Museum 20 items for their Mary Quant exhibition, which is on now until Sunday 16th February 2020. Ruth is clearly a passionate speaker on Mary Quant and it was great to see a very small sample of the 2000 items that belong to her collection of Quant memorabilia.

       


Following Ruth’s talk we enjoyed tea, coffee and hot cross buns while our President Penny went through the business. Details of the May Market were finalised and volunteers for stalls established. Please find time to visit this event, we will have a tombola, craft and plant stalls, homemade produce, books, scarves and handbags and of course tea, coffee and homemade cakes.

Several craft competitions and outings were highlighted and the Village Clean Up on Saturday 27th April was brought to our attention.

Our next meeting is on Wednesday 8th May when we will be voting on resolutions and having Judy Hubble to talk on Shugborough Hall. We meet in the Parish Hall at 7.30pm and visitors will be very welcome. For further information please contact Penny bailey through the link below.