Design Classics Fashion Timeline & Fashion Designers
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Design and Market Influences Advanced Level Product Design: Textiles Fashion Design Classics Fashion Timeline & Fashion Designers Name: "The truly fashionable are beyond fashion." 1904-1980 Cecil Beaton, English fashion photographer and costume designer Mary Quant It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion There are three: Chanel, Dior and Mary Quant Ernestine Carter - Sunday Times Technically she's not a model, but if you ever wore a miniskirt, or if you ever admired someone who was wearing one, thank Mary Quant; she's the British fashion designer who made the mini the decade's defining fashion statement. She was born in '34, so she hit the decade at 26. Her exotic birthplace: Kent, England. Mary Quant’s impact on the 1960’s was……...fab and fun, the fashions of the '60s were the products of a determined revolution. In the '50s, young people had dressed in slightly modified versions of the conserva- tive clothes their parents owned: Pop singers wore gowns, actresses wore gloves, and the most daring thing a guy could wear was a T-shirt, a la Brando and Dean. But then came the '60s and a revolution not just in the clothes, but also in the people who created them. A new breed of fashion designers, inspired by the energy in the streets, drawing on influences from Op and Pop Art, and watching the triumphs of the space age, invented styles that were more daring, more colorful, and more exciting than ever be- fore. The revolution's catalyst was Mary Quant. She was the hippest designer in the hippest area of the world, the unrivaled Queen of Swingin' London, and she was perfectly in sync with the spirit of her times. Sparked by her design innovations, '60s fashions exploded in bursts of crazy new colors, prints, and fabrics. Soon came other de- signers who introduced big geometric patterns, vibrant shades of purple and chartreuse, dresses made of shiny vinyl, or cellophane, or paper, dresses with pieces cut out, dresses made of metal or covered with mirrors, two-piece pantsuits, fur vests, go-go boots, prints from India, micro-mini skirts, midi skirts, maxi skirts, ruffled shirts, nehru jackets, sharp Sassoon cuts, and enormous bellbottoms to the new vocabulary. Mary Quant is quoted in saying, I think that I broke the couture stranglehold that Chanel, Dior and the others had on fashion, when I created styles at the working-girl level. It all added up to a democrati- zation of fashion and entertainment. ... It was very gratifying to see that not only did the mods of the sixties want my clothes, but so did the grandees and the millionaires. They had everything else ... but they hadn't any fun clothes. ... Snobbery went out of fashion, and in the shops you found duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses. Fashion had become the great leveler." For nearly the entire decade, Mary was at ground zero of the fashion explosion that rocked the world. Even at the decade's end Mary kept inventing, kept igniting others with her ideas, and she even dropped another bombshell into the fashion world in '69 — hot pants, which did for shorts what her minis did for skirts. How fun! How creative! How '60s! After graduating from art school, 21-year-old Mary opened up Bazaar, a stylish new clothing shop in London in '55. Catering to urban youth, she filled the shop with the exciting new clothes being worn by rock 'n' roll- ers — the bell bottoms, the bright patterns, and especially the thigh- climbing skirts. When she couldn't find the creative clothes she wanted, she started designing them herself. Her shop was an instant success and quickly drew a celebrity crowd of Beatles and movie stars. She'd keep the shop open late, and people would strip and try on clothes out in the open. "Good designers know that to have any influence they must keep in step with public needs and that intangible 'something in the air.' They must catch the spirit of the day and interpret it in clothes before other design- ers begin to twitch at the nerve ends," she said in Blown Away; "I just hap- pened to start when that something in the air was coming to a boil. The clothes I made happened to fit in exactly with the teenage trend, with pop records and espresso bars and jazz clubs." Later she brought her touch to hosiery and home linens and skin care products. She also wrote several books, among them her autobiography, Quant by Quant in '66, followed by Color by Quant, The Ultimate Make-up and Beauty Book, Classic Make-up and Beauty, and Mary Quant's Daisy Chain of Things to Make and Do. Today her Colour Concepts boutiques, which showcase her color-saturated make-up, are located in world capitals like Paris, New York, and Tokyo. And Mary herself is still working in London, with jewelry and umbrellas and bags and socks among her latest crea- tions. The '60s may be over, but the revolution lives on. Chanel Designer Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883, although she would often claim that her real date of birth was 1893, making her ten years younger. Her place of birth was also something that she sought to disguise. Coco was born in the workhouse where her mother worked, although she asserted that she was born in Auvergne. Her mother died when she was six years old, leaving her father with five children, whom he quickly farmed out to various relatives. Gabrielle adopted the name Coco during a brief career as a singer in cafes and concert halls, between 1905- 08. Coco became the mistress of a rich military officer, and then a wealthy English Industrialist, and the patronage and connections that these men provided her with enabled her to open her own millinery shop in Paris in 1910. She had soon expanded to Deauville and Biarritz. Coco Chanel became the first designer to use jersey during the 1920s, and her relaxed, mannish clothes for women soon became very popular with clients, who were tired of the corseted fashions of previous decades. In 1922, she launched the fragrance Chanel No. 5, which remains popular to this day. Two years later Pierre Wertheiner became her partner (taking on 70% of the fragrance business), and reputedly her lover. Coco launched her signature cardigan jacket in 1925, and the following year matched its success with her little black dress. Both items continue to be a staple part of every Chanel collection. During World War II, Coco was a nurse, although her post-war popularity was greatly diminished by her af- fair with a Nazi officer during the conflict. However, she made her comeback in 1954, her style much unchanged, apart from the introduction of pea jackets and bell-bottoms for women. During her life, Coco Chanel also designed costumes for the stage, including Cocteau’s 'Antigone' (1923) and 'Oedipus Rex' (1937). She also designed film costumes for cinematic works such as 'La Regle de Jeu'. A Broadway musical of her life opened in 1969, with Katharine Hepburn taking the role of Coco. Coco Chanel worked until her death in 1971. By the 1920s Coco Chanel was simplifying dress with her innovative forward looking ideas on female clothes. She borrowed items normally worn by men and translated them into pared down stylish female fashion. She made simple jersey suits and also tweed suits. However her real influence was in the 1950s and 1960s when she translated tweed into a high fashion suit that looked modern and contrasted with the fuller dress designs and over structured suits by Dior. She actively competed against Dior to get her message of more relaxed clothes across to the public. They may not look very relaxed to the people of today, but they were a breakthrough in their time. Chanel's suits were simply gorgeous. She used a range of tweeds and fine textured wool boucle and poodle fabrics. The collarless jackets became so associated with her name that we now re- fer to the style as a Chanel jacket. Inside her jackets were lined with contrast silk which was the same silk she usually used for the blouse that teamed with it. The insides were weighted with gold chain and the buttons all stamped on the back with the Chanel symbol. Edges were trimmed with braids, velvet or ribbon. They were elegant and chic and women have continued to wear variations of them ever since. Such tweed suits were widely copied and translated by the shop Wallis. As a young teenager I recall lusting after a Wallis fine tweed black, braid edged suit in Chanel style which was chain weighted inside the jacket. It was lined inside with emerald green and had a matching Miss Moneypenny emerald blouse. In the sixties clothes by Wallis were the epitome of high style with many designs being made from Paris original patterns that the brand bought the right to use. The house of Chanel has long used tweeds and other crepes from Linton Tweeds. The market though stag- nated for Lintons in the late sixties. But in 1969 they forged ahead to change and revamp their product, to include lighter weight material, a better range of dyes and use of wonder- ful new textural out of the ordinary exotic yarns that enliven design. This has proved very successful particularly in Japan. Ready to wear at once improved the use of materials once restricted to couture use.