Iconic Fashion Designer Mary Quant Has Passed Away at Age 93

The world said goodbye to a true legend of fashion.

Dame Mary Quant, the legendary British fashion designer credited with inventing both the miniskirt and the hotpants has passed away at 93 years of age (via Deadline). According to her family, she “died peacefully at home in Surrey, UK this morning.”

Quant was born in 1930 in London and opened her first boutique after graduating from Goldsmiths University in 1953.

Quant is credited with inventing and popularizing the miniskirt, one of the iconic fashion statements of the 1960’s. She also gave the miniskirt its name, after her favorite car, the Mini.

“It was the girls on the King's Road who invented the miniskirt,” Quant said. “I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes, in which you could move, in which you could run and jump and we would make them the length the customer wanted. I wore them very short and the customers would say, “Shorter, shorter.’”

She described the type of people who would wear a miniskirt as “curiously feminine, but their femininity lies in their attitude rather than in their appearance... She enjoys being noticed, but wittily. She is lively – positive – opinionated.”

Quant also designed short shorts in the late 1960s that would become what we now know as hotpants. In addition, she invented the colored and patterned tights that people in the 60s and 70s often wore with miniskirts and hotpants.

Without Quant, drag queens and femmes everywhere would have nothing to wear. It truly is impossible to overstate how important Quant was to fashion.