20 ms·
Mary Quant, ’60s designer who invented the miniskirt, has died at 93
- mcphage 4y ago"Never in the field of human fashion was so much owed by so many to so few."
- Animats 4y agoSad. Her biography, "Quant by Quant", is a fun read.
- aschearer 4y agoAlways 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.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI think it's only going to accelerate. With these new LLMs, possibly at a much faster clip.
- aschearer 4y agoAt least if Kurzweil has anything to say about it!
- ska 4y agoThis 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 4y agoImagine 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.
- bluGill 4y agoMaybe 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoMy 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.
- mnd999 4y agoLLMs are not as clever as you think they are.
- elorant 4y agoIt 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.
- aksss 4y agoDress codes on private property, what a world!
- aschearer 4y ago"The future is here it's just unevenly distributed."
- morkalork 4y agoFor 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 4y agoIt'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.
- ghaff 4y agoTo 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.
- zdw 4y agoMen's clothing used to be interesting, then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation
- replygirl 4y agohope i'm not the only one who sees the humor in this being a reaction to the invention of a shorter skirt
- bunbunbun 4y agoNot 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.
- makeitdouble 4y agoAn intersting angle to look at these changes is how long it took, and why it didn't happen until then. Minor looking, cosmetic changes often come with deeper and more transversal meanings.
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Quant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Quant
- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago[dead]
- irrational 4y agoIt’s interesting that she considered her miniskirts to be vulgar. I imagine that today a designer asked the same question would respond no.
- brianwawok 4y agoIn the US? They would say no. In Iran? yes.
- tonyarkles 4y agoThe 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-upon-a-time-in-tehran https://www.npr.org/2012/02/16/146977562/foreign-policy-once...
- brianwawok 4y agoRight. It’s possible to go back in time. Usually doesn’t feel great.
- herendin2 4y agoQuant was her real name, and it's an interesting one
- weinzierl 4y agoIt'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.
- standardUser 4y agoI'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 4y agoEven 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-see-every-look https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/2023-oscars-red-carpet-live-...
- standardUser 4y agoYes, 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.
- RedComet 4y agos/invented/popularized They acknowledge this in the article, but use that title anyway.
- ihatepython 4y ago[flagged]
- asdfman123 4y agoWow, I never realized hackernews was interested in fashion.
- peterfirefly 4y agoSmall bits of fashion, anyway.
- timeon 4y agoMini.
- toast0 4y agoWhat? You always hear about people working in finance as a Quant. I didn't realize finance was so fashionable.
- DDayMace 4y agoMary: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart!
- peterfirefly 4y ago"Invented the miniskirt" -- really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl#Gallery
- bufferoverflow 4y agoOr even much much older: "Figurines produced by the Vinča culture (c. 5700–4500 BC) have been interpreted by archaeologists as representing women in miniskirt-like garments"
- gilgoomesh 4y agoHer own Wikipedia page questions the association. Her focus was more on a specific style of minidress (mostly the iconic Mod fashion minidress). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Quant#Quant_and_the_miniskirt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Quant#Quant_and_the_minis...
- brokenkebaby 4y agoShe 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
- dtgriscom 4y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/fashion/mary-quant-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/fashion/mary-quant-dead.h...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]