[HN Gopher] Mary Quant, '60s designer who invented the miniskirt...
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Mary Quant, '60s designer who invented the miniskirt, has died at
93
Author : graderjs
Score : 130 points
Date : 2023-04-13 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nypost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nypost.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Sad. Her biography, "Quant by Quant", is a fun read.
| aschearer wrote:
| Always fun to be reminded that the world I take for granted
| largely didn't exist several generations ago. Bit scarier to
| imagine how the same process will play out over my lifetime.
| replygirl wrote:
| hope i'm not the only one who sees the humor in this being a
| reaction to the invention of a shorter skirt
| bunbunbun wrote:
| Not just a shorter skirt...the miniskirt reflects a cultural
| shift in how women are understood in society, a change in
| what qualifies as sexy, and a transformation of morality as
| expressed by comportment, among other things. It is a truly
| revolutionary development.
| elorant wrote:
| It still doesn't exist in many parts of the world. Most of
| Middle East is extremely conservative when it comes to women's
| rights. In Greece, if a woman wants to visit a monastery she
| has to wear long skirt to avoid scandalizing the monks. I'm
| sure similar rules apply to religious establishments all over
| the world.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| To pile on with my own anecdote:
|
| I used to work at a mega investment bank, and most days, I
| saw at least one woman dressed like a hooker. Classy and
| expensive ones, I guess, but still, I could basically see
| right up their asscracks through their skintight legging-
| pants or microdresses. Obviously this kind of sexual display
| is going to have an effect on the monks, bankers, or
| whoever's trying to get some goddamn work done around them -
| that's why they do it. Hence, dress codes.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| To be fair, there are, if not mostly rules, at least
| generally accepted behaviors for men as well especially in
| many religious settings. And culturally more broadly such as
| wearing shorts in many circumstances.
| weinzierl wrote:
| In most of the western world if a man wants to visit the
| office he has to hide his knees whereas it is accepted for
| women to wear clothing suitable for hot temperatures.
| ghaff wrote:
| For better or worse, in most western business settings--
| tech only loosely qualifies--men historically had a
| uniform (and now have maybe a few potential uniforms--but
| they had lots of tie options, I have a closet full of
| them). Women have/had a lot more options which I assume
| is both a blessing and a curse.
| atyppo wrote:
| Shoulders and arms as well. Never understood why men
| can't wear short sleeve button ups in an office that
| requires dress shirts. Or shorts.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I once visited a Hindu mandir in the US during July,
| wearing shorts. They asked me to wear a big skirt thing
| over my shorts, which I did. Their house, their rules!
| zdw wrote:
| Men's clothing used to be interesting, then there was the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation
| thriftwy wrote:
| The same thing arguably happened to cars, where women
| appropriated the color red and in process of doing that
| to the color orange.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't really understand this claim (maybe I'm thinking
| too much "Ferrari" red and less "Rav 4"?) but if anything
| will make more manufactures make orange cars my male ass
| is all for it...
|
| Men's clothing is also getting more interesting again,
| with attendant public hand-wringing in certain circles.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| As the (male) driver of an orange car, I've definitely
| not experienced that perception. (specifically straight)
| women are the number one hater of the paint job. Nothing
| but compliments from my guy and lesbian friends.
| zdw wrote:
| Subaru?
| jandrese wrote:
| That's strange because to me orange is definitely a bro
| color. It's the "Look at me, I have a fart can and
| aftermarket turbo" color.
| FredPret wrote:
| That and lime green
| weinzierl wrote:
| Large parts of Europe are extremely conservative when it
| comes to clothing rules. In many countries it is forbidden to
| hide your face in public. I think forcing people to show
| certain body parts is as offensive as the opposite.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| > I think forcing people to show certain body parts is as
| offensive as the opposite.
|
| it is basic human instinct to wanna see a face...
| zabzonk wrote:
| it's anti-terrorism laws
| [deleted]
| weinzierl wrote:
| In Italy too, to visit the churches your knees and shoulders
| should be covered. Men and women alike.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I'm not opposed. You wouldn't visit the president dressed
| like a stripper; you shouldn't visit a church dressed
| informally.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Depends on the president, in fairness.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| In the US, men still don't have the right to wear miniskirts.
|
| Sure, the cops might not come after them, but the rest of
| society would.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There are definitely places where the cops would come after
| them, and Republicans are doing their best to increase that
| number of places by making it illegal to be gender-
| nonconforming
| (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-
| lawmakers-a...).
| aksss wrote:
| Dress codes on private property, what a world!
| aschearer wrote:
| "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed."
| KoftaBob wrote:
| There's a huge difference between:
|
| 1. a national culture/laws that restricts women's freedom of
| dress, and
|
| 2. a private religious place that has a dress code
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Bingo. The latter has nothing to do with rights.
| morkalork wrote:
| For a brief time in metropolitan cities it did exist. At
| least as one can see over on reddit in the frequently viral
| posts about women's fashion back in the 60s/70s in
| Lebanon/Iran/Afghanistan.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's not even the clickbait posts: talking to (legitimate)
| refugees from these countries was eye opening. In less than
| a generation, they went backwards a century.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I think it's only going to accelerate. With these new LLMs,
| possibly at a much faster clip.
| ska wrote:
| This is an area where you really have to be careful of
| recency bias.
|
| Consider that someone who was born in the early 1900s and
| lived to their 90s would have witnessed (just in the area of
| technology change): the introduction of electricity in the
| home, perhaps also seen their house go onto municipal water
| and sewage. The move from horse-drawn to automobiles. The
| introduction of flight. The introduction of broadcast radio,
| then the introduction of TV, then the introduction of the
| internet. Not to mention a sea change in agriculture, etc.
|
| It's tempting to think "wow things are so much faster now",
| but that was pretty damn fast. It's especially risky to base
| the idea of real rate of change on the current hot topics,
| that usually ends up being wrong (but not always).
| ghaff wrote:
| Imagine you were teleported to today from just 30 years
| ago, when many of us had been working for quite a long
| time. Sure. Many aspects of daily life would seem pretty
| familiar. Cars aren't all that different. In a given city,
| many of the same shops would even be present. But, almost
| anything to do with obtaining and using information would
| be utterly alien.
| vkou wrote:
| > But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using
| information would be utterly alien.
|
| Would it? I doubt it. Computers answering 'arbitrary'
| queries were a trope of popular fiction for a lot longer
| than the past 30 years, and computers answering limited
| queries were already commonplace. In the lifespan of
| someone who was an adult in 1993, computers went from
| being something that occupied most of a room to something
| that could be found in many offices.
|
| Also, the first cell phone was built in _1973_.
|
| For the information age to be _truly_ alien, you have to
| go back to a time well _before_ Turing machines. 1933?
| Maybe even further past that, to before wireless
| communication. 1873?
| ska wrote:
| Are you suggesting this is a bigger change than say,
| 1910-1940, or 1920-1950 to use your timeline? I don't
| really understand what you are trying to say in the
| above.
|
| Beyond that, most of the bones of the information systems
| were already there in 1993, you'll have to add at least
| another 20 years, if not pre-computer, to make it
| "alien".
|
| I think ubiquitous cell phones would be a surprise, but
| it's hard to argue that is a bigger change than say,
| automobiles.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Ubiquitous everyone carries a smartphone mobility that
| isn't plugged into centralized information sources should
| perhaps, in retrospect, been predictable in 1993 but I
| don't think it was obvious. It certainly wasn't 10 years
| earlier to the vast majority of people other than as a
| hand wavy Foundation-style Galactic Library (which tended
| to be the SF-type prediction).
|
| Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have
| predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time
| would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous
| information retrieval.
| ska wrote:
| >Also, don't take what I wrote to be
|
| Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the
| current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than
| about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a
| counterexample I think you've failed to establish one,
| and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to
| achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come
| a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone
| would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I
| guess.
| b1c1jones wrote:
| Star Trek communicators and tricorders come pretty close,
| but then again that was predicted for the 23rd century.
| One beef I have about The Expanse is that they have cell
| phones, albeit fancy holographic ones. Not sure we will
| still be using that paradigm, we may have moved into
| wearable devices or something involving direct brain
| communication by then. We are already on the verge of
| that.
| Retric wrote:
| I would argue that the smartphone is a smaller change to
| society than the quickly ubiquitous automobile.
|
| You can argue about precursors to automobiles on that
| adoption curve, but there were many precursors to the
| smartphones on the go connectivity such as the first
| pager system launched all the way back in 1950. And of
| course the internet had been around for decades by 1993.
|
| We think of the internet as a huge revolution in how
| people shop for example, but fundamentally it's the same
| basic idea as introduced by the ubiquitous sears catalog
| by telephone or even mail.
| saltcured wrote:
| In my suburban California high-school circa 1990, there
| were multiple kids carrying "digital" pagers and a few
| with cell phones. They didn't seem like time travelers.
| Others would gossip as to whether they were rich, spoiled
| brats or maybe selling drugs.
|
| It is true that pocket information was either printed
| material or something more specialized like an electronic
| dictionary. The newest information-delivery fad was
| multimedia CD-ROM applications. On the TV front, product
| infomercials were already a familiar cliche and CNN had
| already debuted live-streaming war coverage with the
| first Gulf War.
|
| The local libraries had a mix of physical card catalogs
| and digital catalogs. There were still banks of
| microfiche readers to view archived newspapers. The
| digital catalogs were a mix of green-screen terminals to
| some centralized computer and some starting to be based
| on regular PCs running a library kiosk application. The
| libraries still had more space dedicated to the stacks of
| books than contemporary ones which seem to have more
| lounges and meeting spaces.
|
| The equivalent of internet-based shopping was ordering
| from printed catalogs either by mail-order or phone-
| order. Most products would ship in 2-4 weeks instead of a
| few days unless you paid silly money for expedited
| service. There was still the lingering concept of cash-
| on-delivery, where you would give the UPS driver money or
| a cashier's check when they delivered your package rather
| than paying the sender in advance. You were more likely
| to buy clothes locally unless ordering from a company
| like Columbia or LL Bean.
| robryk wrote:
| The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to
| various information sources" part was an easy
| extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994:
| Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from
| those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994.
| General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a
| device, was created in 1990.
|
| I grant you that the existence of such easy to query
| information sources was probably less predictable.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| There has been a huge shift in the way we interact with
| government and banking services. I no longer have to
| visit the motor vehicle registry to get my car registered
| (used to be an annual PITA), don't have to fill out a
| paper form and mail it to do my taxes, I renew all my
| insurance online rather than going into a physical
| building, can check my bank balance any time I want,
| transfer money etc.
|
| I'm only 54 but the world _did_ change radically since I
| was a teenager. That 's only 10 years since the 1993
| benchmark of "alien". That was a wild 10 years.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| That's the really fascinating thing for me. You were a
| young adult when the shift happened. I turn 40 this year
| and in a lot of ways it feels like it's been, mobile
| phones being the exception, logical incremental
| improvements since I was a teenager. I had a 56k modem
| for 2 years but got a 1.5MBit DSL line when I was around
| 16. Computing power has grown dramatically from my 133MHz
| Pentium with 16MB of RAM, but nothing feels fundamentally
| that much different beyond the fact that half the apps I
| have installed on my machine are written in HTML and
| JavaScript, embed a full web browser, and use
| dramatically more RAM than they used to.
|
| I remember the shift. I remember the upgrade from my
| VIC-20 to my XT to my 586, but I don't remember life
| being that much different. The biggest difference, for
| me, is this whole notion of "being available everywhere
| all the time" that came along first with cellphones and
| then doubled down with smartphones. I remember being able
| to take off on my bike, going to a park, and reading a
| book with absolutely no distraction at all. Or going to
| the cabin and not having an Internet connection.
| tmtvl wrote:
| 30 years ago, 1993... isn't that when Bill Clinton's
| inauguration was live streamed over the internet? Or was
| that '97? ...either way, the internet was definitely up
| and coming around then.
| lttlrck wrote:
| I don't know about Bill, but in '93 I was downloading
| porn (and genuinely useful information) in the university
| lab from mainly academic sites.
|
| For reasons I forget we could not use ftp. The workaround
| was telnet in, cat meow.jpg | uuencode. Then copy the
| terminal output to a text editor, save and uudecode it
| open in xview. And wait for the jpeg to decode, line by
| line...
|
| All this on glorious HP PA-RISC workstations.
|
| The intervening years have been simplifying the access to
| information from NCSA mosaic to ChatGPT today. Amazing to
| watch it happen.
|
| But I will never forget the magic of uuencode.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe to you, but 30 years ago I was already using the
| internet. BBSes were common in tech circles as well. We
| didn't have google, but there were search engines to look
| for files that you could then FTP. AOL was already
| nearing their peak, them and competitors were in many
| ways trying to be what the internet became. 30 years ago
| my dad was already calling in to work from home (2400
| baud was not as good as being in the office, but when a
| customer has a problem at 3am that was the fastest way to
| fix the problem). 30 years ago people would get the
| details wrong, but they had already imagined today's
| world even if they couldn't actually take part in one of
| the forerunners to it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was very much into BBSs. Never AOL, although CIS. 30
| years ago? I don't think I had an Internet connection
| though. (Had been barely exposed to it in school in the
| late 70s.) Got things like competitive spec information
| as a product manager from requesting it from analysts we
| paid a lot of money to for faxing us data sheets. Pricing
| info was very fragmentary. There were cell phones--barely
| --not sure when I got my first one as a rarely-used
| backup device.
|
| A mobile almost always connected world might have been
| something I might have imagined in some form as
| futurology but would probably have take different forms.
| See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of
| Fealty for example.
| bluGill wrote:
| My local university had a free dialup number that you
| could use to telnet into anything on that supported
| telnet. There were a few BBSes on the internet, but I
| didn't know how to do anything with it. 29 years and 6
| months ago I actually went to university for the first
| time and my dorm had terminals, plus some of my homework
| actually required that I do things that were on the
| internet.
|
| The first wifi connected laptops were also coming out at
| about that time. Nobody thought of phones as for more
| than voice yet (cell phones did exist, but the cost per
| minute was very high, and they only supported voice. They
| also didn't fit in a pocket).
|
| Like I said the ideas were all in place close enough that
| someone from 30 years ago would recognize everything as
| the future they imagined - but the details are very
| different between what they imagined and what the reality
| turned out to be.
| vic-traill wrote:
| Don't forget Man on the Moon and the atom bomb.
|
| The 20th century was one helluva inventive time, for better
| and worse.
| richardw wrote:
| I think this is an area where you have to be careful of
| people-like-me bias. (Apologies :) Most people in the world
| didn't have most of those things, but they now largely all
| have cellphones. Any child with access to the internet can
| access any piece of information on all of the items you
| mentioned. And now/soon any of those kids can speak with an
| electronic friend who can explain it to them in their own
| language.
|
| In short, a huge percentage of the world didn't benefit and
| didn't participate or compete or come up with ideas. I
| think it's safe to say that generates more change, faster,
| for all of us.
| mnd999 wrote:
| LLMs are not as clever as you think they are.
| aschearer wrote:
| At least if Kurzweil has anything to say about it!
| herendin2 wrote:
| Quant was her real name, and it's an interesting one
| weinzierl wrote:
| It's a not exactly a common name in Germany, but also not
| unusual. The owner family of BMW is called Quandt (with a
| slight spelling variation) for example.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| irrational wrote:
| It's interesting that she considered her miniskirts to be vulgar.
| I imagine that today a designer asked the same question would
| respond no.
| brianwawok wrote:
| In the US? They would say no. In Iran? yes.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| The really interesting thing to me is that you're probably
| correct today, but not in the 70s:
| https://www.npr.org/2012/02/16/146977562/foreign-policy-
| once...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Quant
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| She herself pointed that she didn't invent mini, just followed
| her customers preferred style. But when facts won't make a catchy
| headline, who would care about them? Not journos for sure
| RedComet wrote:
| s/invented/popularized
|
| They acknowledge this in the article, but use that title anyway.
| DDayMace wrote:
| Mary: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart!
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm glad she got to live to see fashion win out over prudity.
| Other than the indefensible ban on the female chest, I see
| virtually no limits on how people are free to dress in public in
| recent years, at least in more edgy urban areas.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Even that bit seems to be shifting. Recent avant-garde fashion
| is already being bolder with translucent fabrics and edgier
| cuts in the breast area1. These are the kind of dresses and
| tops where a bra is not just optional, but really out of the
| question.
|
| The Covid lockdowns also seem to have had an effect on the
| wearing of bras with plenty of people with smaller breasts
| ditching them completely (my wife did) or going for bralettes
| instead.
|
| 1: The usual showing off at the Oscars was interesting:
| https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/2023-oscars-red-carpet-live-...
| standardUser wrote:
| Yes, I see the same trends! I live in a fashion forward area
| of NY and bras are few and far between in recent years. And
| fully translucent tops are not uncommon in a lot of
| dance/club scenes.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| "Invented the miniskirt" -- really?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl#Gallery
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Or even much much older:
|
| "Figurines produced by the Vinca culture (c. 5700-4500 BC) have
| been interpreted by archaeologists as representing women in
| miniskirt-like garments"
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Wow, I never realized hackernews was interested in fashion.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Small bits of fashion, anyway.
| timeon wrote:
| Mini.
| ihatepython wrote:
| Up with miniskirts!
| [deleted]
| mcphage wrote:
| "Never in the field of human fashion was so much owed by so many
| to so few."
| dtgriscom wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/fashion/mary-quant-dead.h...
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