There’s something about Mary

I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age I am still writing about clothes (in the Oldie). This gives me one USP: it means that I was actually around — even wearing them myself — when the revolutionary fashion ideas that are now the stuff of museum exhibitions were being invented. Next month the Mary Quant exhibition opens at the V&A, and sure enough I have been asked to talk about those giddy times for a video that will be shown at the museum.

I was 16 in the autumn of 1955 when Quant’s shop, Bazaar, first shocked the passers-by in the King’s Road, Chelsea, with its startling window displays. One of these featured a black-and-white gingham skirt. This may not look very remarkable to readers today, but until Quant gingham had only really been used for kitchen curtains or tablecloths.

In 1961, at the age of 21, I found myself young fashion editor of the Sunday Times. The column on young fashion was called the Young Grown-Ups because that is how young women dressed then — our mothers set the styles and we looked just like them, only younger, down to their (and our) permed brown hair.

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I was the luckiest person in the entire world. Not because of the job itself, but because getting it coincided with huge changes in my world, which I was now perfectly placed to write about. Young people were taking over every aspect of the fashion industry: Vidal Sassoon was about to revolutionise hair cutting, styling and colour (Nora Ephron once wrote that the best thing to happen to women in the 20th century was not feminism but hair dye); enthusiastic young photographers were waiting to take over from the 1950s greats, fresh-faced model girls were graduating from Lucie Clayton’s modelling school and replacing their sophisticated predecessors, and a whole bunch of young designers were finishing their degrees at the Royal College of Art.