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Mary quant
Mary Quant, 1969.
Mary Quant, 1969.

Fashion archive: Mary Quant on fashion and the crotch

This article is more than 10 years old

[This was the first article in The Permissive Society, a celebrated series with a title which coined a national phrase.]

“But I love vulgarity. Good taste is death, vulgarity is life.” I had asked Mary Quant whether she did not feel there to be an element of vulgarity in cut-out and see-through dresses which, giving an illusion of nothing beneath, can be regarded as an aspect of the permissive society.

“People call things vulgar when they are new. When they have become old they become good taste. Fashion reflects what is really in the air. It reflects what people are reading and thinking and listening to, and architecture, painting, attitudes to success and to society. People only see permissiveness in the sense of having more. But the young today are less materialistic and more intelligent than ever. And they’ve got sex in perspective, they’re not hung up on it any more, it’s not difficult, they take it or leave it alone.”

“You would agree that there is an element of brutalism in fashion today? The intention [of some fashion photographers] is to shock, although the possibilities of shocking our present society without being pornographic must soon be exhausted.”

“Pornography is great if it’s good.”

“What is good pornography?”

“Good pornography is erotic but pleasing. Only ugliness is obscene.”

Earlier we had looked at some of the photographs in a glossy magazine and paused at one of a model girl in knickerbockers lying on her back with her legs straddled up in the air.

“You see,” Mary had said, “this is a tremendously sexy picture, but the girl is more inaccessible than she would be in any other period of fashion. She’s got those thick tweed knickerbockers buckled tight under the knee, and she’ll have stocking tights underneath and perhaps a pantie girdle. That’s the thing about today’s fashions - they’re sexy to look at but really more puritan than ever.”

“You know James Laver’s famous fashion theory of the erogenous zone which shifts the focus of attraction in different periods ... what is the erogenous zone of our present period?”

“The crutch ... the most natural erogenous zone. Clothes are designed to lead the eye to it. It’s not ‘come hither,’ but it’s provocative. She’s standing there defiantly with her legs apart saying ‘I’m very sexy, I enjoy sex, I feel provocative, but you’re going to have a job to get me. You’ve got to excite me and you’ve got to be jolly marvellous to attract me...’ Now that there is the pill, women are the sex in charge. They, and they only, can decide to conceive.”

quant
The Guardian, 10 October 1967

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