Asvoff: A documentary on the designer Mary Quant tells the story of female emancipation
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Asvoff, the fashion film festival presented by Diane Pernet, has inaugurated its 2024 programme with "Quant", a documentary on the British stylist Mary Quant, one of the most iconic fashion designers of the 60s.
By giving women the opportunity to show their legs, Quant embodied, from a sartorial point of view, female liberation. The documentary, directed by Sadie Frost and produced by Goldfinch, is peppered with archival footage and testimonies from people who knew and associated with her.
Born in 1930, Quant was already a liberated young girl when she met her future husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, at the art school where she was studying. Together, they formed a dream team that propelled her style beyond 'Swinging London', the London of the sixties.
The goal? To free feminine aesthetics from the straitjacket of the 50s, embodied by Dior's New Look or Gabrielle Chanel, who had been known to cover the knees of women, finding them "horrible".
"Be sexy, feel good" were the values of the brunette with the iconic hairstyle. She applied her joy of life and her avant-gardism through miniskirts, a taste for colours or floral patterns. The documentary describes the commercial success of this brand, which corresponded to the explosion of ready-to-wear and makeup licenses.
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At the time, there was no question of outsourcing production to lower costs. Everything was made in England and yet, the fashion proposed by Quant was affordable, confided producer Ben Charles Edwards to FashionUnited after the screening of Asvoff, who said "that my mother, who was a secretary, could afford Mary Quant."
At this point, the question arises as to what has changed in terms of pricing policy between those years and today, when the 'Made in...' label is weighing down prices.
The documentary points out that no one will ever know if Quant invented the miniskirt (a claim André Courrèges could also make). But the fact is that she embodied it better than anyone, to the point that fashion evolved, was something to hold on to.
This was until her husband's death in 1990, after which the designer had not found the fire to create again, while her son, Orlando Plunket Greene, did not have the wish to continue the adventure. Quant died on April 13, 2023.
Before this, however, she was able to watch the documentary that told her story, when it was screened in England on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition organised in 2019, at the Victoria and Albert Museum.