Mary Quant Quotes

The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her.

— Mary Quant

“Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

— Mary Quant

“Jean Shrimpton was the most beautiful of all the models I have known. To walk down the King's Road, Chelsea, with Shrimpton was like walking through the rye. Strong men just keeled over right and left as she strode up the street.”

— Mary Quant

As the daughter of two teachers with first-class degrees, I'd always seen myself as a duffer by comparison.

— Mary Quant

“I can't imagine not working, really. I just think work's more fun than fun.”

— Mary Quant

“I don't have birthdays.”

— Mary Quant

“I dressed like Leslie Caron as a teenager: soft school pleats, Peter Pan collars.”

— Mary Quant

“I have an awful lot of energy.”

— Mary Quant

“I liked masculine fabrics: Prince of Wales checks, city pinstripes, and flannels - worn with black tights, flattish shoes.”

— Mary Quant

“My favourite Nice restaurant is in the market. It's open mainly for the market people, and shuts in August.”

— Mary Quant

My garden in England is full of eating-out places, for heat waves, warm September evenings, or lunch on a frosty Christmas morning.

— Mary Quant

“People only see permissiveness in the sense of having more.”

— Mary Quant

“Fashion is a very ongoing, renewing thing, about change and reaching for the next thing. You are permanently dissatisfied, and it's always got to get better.”

— Mary Quant

“Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.”

— Mary Quant

“Fashion should be a game.”

— Mary Quant

“Being young is greatly overestimated ... Any failure seems so total. Later on you realize you can have another go.”

— Mary Quant

The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They gave him love and he invented marriage.

— Mary Quant

“One of the things I've learned is never to horde ideas, because either they are not so relevant or they've gone stale. Whatever it is, pour it out.”

— Mary Quant