From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli – 20 June

The management of the Bendigo Art Gallery is to be heartily congratulated on the brilliance and daring of their entrepreneurial programming. It has created for the city of Bendigo the finest regional public institution in Victoria, if not Australia.

WHILE it is impossible to compete with the blockbuster collections which major city galleries are able to bring into the country, the BAG is securing many of the finest exhibition available to international regional managements. Their association with London’s prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A), has served them well. It was a stroke of creative genius to form such a productive and appealing alliance.

The current Mary Quant exhibition is a direct consequence of their clever business planning. The exhibition covers the years 1955-75, and for those of us who lived through some of those years, it is a happy time re-visited.

It would be fair to say, Mary Quant changed the face of fashion for young women, irrevocably. It was only ten-years since the end of the Second World War, and young girls were still dressing to look like their mothers. Pictures of the 20-year-old Princess Elizabeth, dressed by Norman Hartnell, show her looking like a middle aged woman; a clone of Queen Elizabeth, her mother.

Mary Quant was the first British first fashion designer to create a range specifically for young women – from duchesses to typists.

Ernestine Carter, the influential American-born British museum curator, journalist, and fashion writer said, “It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior and Mary Quant.”

While no-one could argue with those three names, it might be possible to add to that eminent list: Sir Norman Hartnell (who was discovered by the romantic novelist, Dame Barbara Cartland, after he came down from Cambridge in 1921); Sir Hardy Amies (a royal dress designer, he was a member of Winston Churchill’s elite Special Operations Executive in WW2 (2nd Lieutenant) and served with the Belgian resistance; sabotaging, and eliminating double-agents and dozens of Nazi sympathisers); and the Spanish couturier, Cristóbal Balenciaga (a master in tailoring, he reshaped women’s silhouette in the 1950s).

Balenciaga, who dressed HSH Princess Grace of Monaco, actresses Ava Gardner and Audrey Hepburn, and the former US First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards.

Christian Dior referred to him as, “The master of us all.”

Coco Chanel said, “He is the only couturier in the truest sense of the word. The others are simply fashion designers.”

On the day Balenciaga died, 1972, Women’s Wear Daily ran the headline, “The King is dead.”

It is true: Dame Mary Quant was in right place, at the right time, and she successfully seized the opportunity. In the same way popular music had begun catering for the younger generation, Mary Quant’s creative talent, coupled with a shrewd business eye, was able to satisfy a gaping demand. By the mid-60s her followers no longer resembled their mothers! Mary Quant had made her mark, and, around the world, young women were looking sensational!

Whether Quant did, or did not, create the mini-skirt matters little. What followed was one of the most sensational fashion looks of all time. The combination of long boots, coloured patterned tights, and micro-mini skirts set the King’s Road, Chelsea, pulsating! Exhilarated young women had never been more fashionably dressed, and at prices they could afford.

The Bendigo Art Gallery, Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary Exhibition, provides an unrivalled insight into the career of one of Britain’s most revolutionary and important fashion designers.

In the same way we look back at Victorian collections, this fantastic Mary Quant collection will, 100 years hence, speak volumes to the anthropologists, historians, and fashion design students, looking to make sense of the swinging mid-20th century.

Roland can be contacted via [email protected].