Quotes from Mary Quant

I dressed like Leslie Caron as a teenager: soft school pleats, Peter Pan collars.

Fashion is a tool... to compete in life outside the home

My favourite Nice restaurant is in the market. It's open mainly for the market people, and shuts in August.

I absolutely adore cows. They're the most fascinating, gentle and beautiful animals. Their eyes are so amazing. I have ten that live on the land around my house. I love to talk to them. There are few things better than falling asleep in a field and being woken up by an inquisitive cow.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

The whole 1960s thing was a ten-year running party, which was lovely. It started at the end of the 1950s and sort of faded a bit when it became muddled with flower power. It was marvelous.

Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.

The fashionable woman is sexy, witty, and dry-cleaned.

Of course, I remember when everybody was thin. It wasn't until I went to America in the Sixties that I saw anyone who wasn't skinny thin.

Fashion is a very ongoing, renewing thing, about change and reaching for the next thing. You are permanently dissatisfied, and it's always got to get better.

The miniskirt caused an extraordinarily powerful reaction. There were the people who hated it.

When I opened my first shop, city gents were still carrying tightly furled umbrellas and wearing bowler hats. It was into this world that I launched my new ideas about fashion.

Coco Chanel hated me. I can understand why.

One thing I longed to do was to design a complete look, from head to toe, so I started a make-up line in 1966.

Of course I remember everything I've ever worn.

I liked masculine fabrics: Prince of Wales checks, city pinstripes, and flannels - worn with black tights, flattish shoes.

I didn't get fat even when I was pregnant. You have to work very hard at staying slim, and it's a bore. But it's worth it.

As well as being a creative genius, Vidal Sassoon was a formative figure of the Sixties. Along with the Pill and the mini-skirt, his influence was truly liberating.

I always designed clothes from a very young age because I didn't like the way they were. They were paralyzing; they were stilted.

I designed the miniskirt that caused so much havoc in the Sixties - the miniskirt that was such fun but has travelled well to today.

Rules are invented for lazy people who don't want to think for themselves.

I long for my garden to be complete. Working in it is one of my joys, but it will never be finished because it's forever changing with the seasons.

I still like the King's Road. It is very alive; it is a hustle of things from different countries and so on. It is lovely.

A woman is as young as her knees.