The Mini Skirt
A skirt with a hemline well above the knee — initially at mid-thigh, eventually at the hip — developed by Mary Quant in her Chelsea boutique Bazaar and named, she said, after her favorite car. The design made movement and physical freedom central to its aesthetic rather than a regrettable compromise, and it was inseparable from the tights that replaced stockings in making such short hemlines wearable. Versions in Lurex, vinyl, and Op Art prints became the uniform of Swinging London.
The mini skirt is the defining garment of the 1960s youth revolution, representing a complete rejection of the New Look's adult formality and the reclamation of fashion by a generation of working-class and middle-class young women for whom Paris haute couture was an irrelevance. Its adoption across class boundaries was unprecedented — the same garment worn by Twiggy and by shop assistants in Birmingham — making it the most genuinely democratic fashion revolution since Chanel's jersey dress.
Quant launched the mini in 1964 as London was experiencing the most concentrated explosion of youth culture in Western history — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and Carnaby Street's boutiques all simultaneously. The mini's association with sexual liberation and female autonomy was inseparable from the introduction of the contraceptive pill in Britain in 1961, which for the first time gave women genuine control over their reproductive lives.