Mary Quant at the V&A

Last week we were in London for a few days and I took the opportunity to go to the Mary Quant exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum, before it closes on 16th February. (It's then going to the V&A Dundee, I believe.)

The exhibition was busy, with many visitors who were old enough to remember the 60s, and who were reminiscing about the styles.  I was a teenager in the 60s myself, though I also remember that stockings were only replaced by tights quite late in the 60s, and stockings were horrible garments — for me, that made some of the early designs look less free and easy than they might.  If you were already grown up in the early 60s, I'm sure that in comparison with 1950s styles, they were much less constrained.

Apart from the spectre of stockings, I enjoyed it very much and thought it was an excellent exhibition.  Many of the garments on show had been given or lent by the women who had worn them when they were new, and had treasured them ever since.  Often there was a photo of the owner, wearing the garment, perhaps for a special occasion, and often a page from Vogue or Harper's Bazaar, showing how it was originally portrayed in the fashion press.  It was helpful that the prices were translated into modern values— in the early 60s, when Mary Quant was designing clothes for her Bazaar shop in Chelsea, the clothes were made in small quantities and were expensive.  It was only later, when her designs were mass-produced, that they became more accessible.

I was, of course, on the lookout for knitting. I know that in 1965 and 1966 Mary Quant produced  two collections of designs for hand knitters (and crocheters) that were published as knitting pattern leaflets — we have many of the leaflets in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  I wrote here about the Patons pattern leaflets with Mary Quant designs, and I knitted a Mary Quant short-sleeved jumper from a Lee Target leaflet myself a few years ago, which I showed here.   The exhibition had a case devoted to the knitting patterns, and to the dress patterns for Butterick also designed by Mary Quant.  (My mother made a dress for me from one of the Butterick patterns, in the mid 60s, but the dress is long gone, and I don't have any photos of it, sadly.)

Several of the knitting patterns were on show, and an actual dress, knitted to a Sirdar pattern. It's one of the 1966 collection, with Mary Quant's daisy motif in the background, and also on the pocket of the dress.  (The exhibition label gives  'Candytwist' as the name of the design, but that is actually the name of the Sirdar yarn that the leaflet specifies — unlike Mary Quant's other designs, those in the knitting patterns don't have names.)

Sirdar leaflet 2353

The model on the pattern leaflet is Jill Kennington (now a photographer), who appears on several of the other Quant knitting patterns too — I liked the fact that exhibition names the model in many of the photos that publicised Mary Quant's designs.  There are several models that appear over and over again in knitting pattern leaflets, so you recognise their faces, but usually you don't know their names — it seems a great pity to me that they aren't better known.   As well as modelling for the 1960s leaflets, Jill Kennington appears in a video made for the exhibition, talking about the experience of being a model for Mary Quant, and the contrast with the 1950s, when models were elegant, stately and aloof.


Here's the dress in the exhibition that was knitted to the Sirdar pattern.  (I'm sorry it's not a very good photo, through the glass of the case.)  The dress has been given to the V&A and was knitted by the donor's mother, for the donor, who described it as "a labour of love". 

I looked for knitwear elsewhere in the exhibition, too, but the only knitting I spotted was part of a dress, designed by Mary Quant in 1964.  Most of the dress is made of checked flannel, but the sleeves, collar and belt are hand-knitted in cream wool.

It was featured in Harper's Bazaar magazine in August 1964, where it was described as "Tattersall check flannel shirt dress with knitted sleeves, collar and skinny belt by Mary Quant, 15gns. at Bazaar."  In the magazine, it was modelled by Grace Coddington (now creative director at American Vogue), and there's also a photo of Mary Quant wearing the dress, posed with Vidal Sassoon trimming her fringe.  15 gns. (guineas) is equivalent to £15.75, which doesn't sound a lot, but its value today would be over £320.  As the exhibition notes, it was not a suitable design for mass-production.

But of course, there is plenty of other material in the exhibition, from underwear and make-up to quite formal evening wear.  Some of the early designs, made in small quantities, are beautifully made, with details that would be impossible, I think, to mass produce.  Well worth seeing.  And there's a very well-illustrated book to go with the exhibition, too.  (See top photo. Yes, I bought a copy.)

Mary Quant knitting patterns

The lack of posts recently is due to The Move - the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection's move to new premises in Slaithwaite.  It happened the week before last, and all went well, though there is still a lot of sorting out to do - lots of boxes stacked on the floor, waiting to be put on shelves.  I'll say more about our new location another time. 

Meanwhile, over on Instagram, I have been working through my #50yearsofPatonspatterns series of posts, starting in 1979 and working backwards.  We are nearly through the 1960s, and I picked two Mary Quant patterns to represent 1965 and 1966.  In both years, she designed a collection of knitting and crochet patterns in Courtelle yarns, for several of the spinning companies, including Patons.  There were nine Patons patterns in all, six in 1965 and three in 1966.  I'll show them all here.

First the 1965 leaflets. The yarn for all six is Patons Flair, a wool-Courtelle blend, which was DK weight, to judge by the tension.

Patons 9526, below,  is a skinny-rib sleeveless polo-neck sweater - perhaps not as distinctive now as it was in 1965. 

Patons 9526

Patons leaflet 9527 is a ribbed sweater, with crocheted collar and cuff, and matching knee-socks, also with a crochet trim for the turnover.

Patons 9527

Next is a ribbed cardigan, with a small collar, knitted in reverse stocking stitch, folded in half and stitched down.  You were clearly not intended to wear it as an extra layer, so it's more a button-up sweater than a cardigan. 

Patons 9528

Patons 9529 is a dress, with ribbed bodice, little stand-up collar, and knitted belt.  More knee-socks, this time in a wide rib to match the dress bodice. 

Patons 9529

Then another dress, mostly ribbed, with cable panels in the skirt, a big roll collar, also ribbed, and a knitted tie belt.  There is a matching cabled hat, with pompom, and a pair of matching mitts. I like the dress, though I generally feel that knitted dresses won't keep their shape. 

Patons 9530

And finally, an ensemble of jumper and skirt, with a bonnet and stockings.  The body of the jumper is ribbed.  The skirt looks as though it is in the same rib, knitted sideways, but in fact it's knitted top down. The sleeves, stockings and bonnet are all crocheted.

Patons 9531

It's notable that wide ribbing is a feature of all these 1965 designs, so the jumpers and dresses fit closely. 

It's easy to distinguish the 1966 leaflets from the 1965 designs, across all the spinners that had these Mary Quant designs in Courtelle.  The leaflets in the 1966 collection all have the Mary Quant daisy as part of the background, and the models have the Vidal Sassoon geometric hairstyle that she had adopted herself and made famous.  The 1966 Patons designs are all in a pure Courtelle yarn, also a DK weight by the tension.

The first of the 1966 Patons designs is leaflet 9700 - a cardigan and stockings outfit. They are both worked in rib. The front of the cardigan has a smocked yoke, worked afterwards by using a contrast thread to bind adjacent ribs together.  (The instructions for the smocking are a bit skimpy, I have to say.)  There are also bands of smocking in the stockings, just below the knee - which looks a bit strange.

Patons 9700

Patons 9701 is a short-sleeved jumper and skirt outfit.  The jumper has narrow stripes of a contrast colour across the yoke, back and front, and there is a crochet trim in both colours around the neck and bottom of the sleeves.  The belt is also knitted, in the contrast colour.  Of all these Mary Quant designs for Patons, this one is my favourite.

Patons 9701

And the final pattern in this collection is Patons 9702, a ribbed jumper and matching stockings.  The contrast band on the sleeves is worked by using two balls of the main colour and one of the contrast, and then using just the contrast colour to knit a saddle shoulder.  Finally, the polo collar is added after the jumper is sewn up.  The stockings are also in two colours, as you can see from the illustration, which gives an odd knee-sock effect.  (And the model is wearing white sling-back shoes too, not to mention the shorts over stockings - altogether a bizarre outfit.)

Patons 9702

The dresses and skirts in these leaflets are shown finishing above the knee, but they aren't as extremely short as they became later - just as well, because in 1966 women were still wearing stockings rather than tights.  So Mary Quant designed knitted and crocheted stockings, not principally to avoid all the extra work in making tights, but because women didn't wear tights at that time - though that changed only a year or two later.

A Mary Quant exhibition is opening at the V&A  next month, which I hope to get to.  And there is an exhibition at the Fashion & Textile Museum on "Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution", until June, which features the work of Mary Quant and Terence Conran.  It seems that there is a resurgence of interest in the 1960s, and Mary Quant in particular - so I'll offer this post as a knitting and crochet contribution to that.   

A Pink Tie Event

Patons 9887

Yesterday I was going through a parcel of pattern leaflets donated to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, when this one caught my eye.  As it would - it is very eye-catching.  The description says "This modern dress with 'kipper' tie is right up to the minute!", the minute in question being 1967, or possibly 1966.  

The dress has some nice features, if you can get yourself into a 1960s mindset - shirt-style collar and cuffs to go with the tie, and the wide point of the tie standing out against the paler pink.  And notice that it's worn with white tights, which had a moment back then.

It shows the influence of Mary Quant on 1960s fashions.  Here, for instance, is a pattern of hers issued by Patons in 1966:

Patons 9701

I browsed through other Patons patterns published about the same time, to see of there were other 'trendy' designs.  There weren't many - as always, many of the patterns were for babies and children.  And there were a lot of Aran designs - Aran jumpers were popular in the late 1960s.  And also this was a young fashion - most older women wouldn't have dreamed of wearing a minidress in 1967.    But I did find a few examples.

Patons 9943

"Twisted rib and lace patterning make this dress a winner."  I like the three different stitch patterns used in bands so that the fabric gets less dense moving from the hem to the neck.  The plain round neck is another influence from Mary Quant, I think.  (I also think that that hair isn't all her own...)

Patons 9928

You could also crochet yourself a dress - "This attractive yet easy-to-crochet dress has a lace patterned skirt and a contrasting yoke."

And you should wear your minidress with a beret.

Patons 9808

I think this dress is very nice (although again you've got a warm dress with short sleeves).  There is no waist shaping - it's just done by the change from stocking stitch to a wide rib.  Patons Bracken was a flecked wool, giving the oatmeal-y effect, which I think is really attractive.  

And to top off the outfit, you could knit the beret.  To emphasise that this was a young fashion, the pattern says that the largest size is for a girl of up to 16 years, though in fact a beret that fits a 16 year old should also fit an adult.

Patons 9881

My sister, who was a fashion-conscious teenager at the time, had a pink angora dress (short, but with long sleeves) and a matching pink beret, both knitted by our mother.  It was very warm and cosy, I'm sure, though it probably shed fibres everywhere.  The dress is long gone, but I think I may still have the beret.   I shall look.

My Mary Quant Sweater

I finished sewing up a sweater just before the Knitting & Crochet Guild Convention, a couple of weeks ago.  In fact, I started it more than two years ago, in 2013.  I got most of it knitted that summer, and then put it away for the winter, because it's a summer sweater.  I didn't get it out again until this year, and then it sat for a while waiting to be sewn up.  But now it's done, and I've worn it, and it's turned out very well.

It's from a pattern leaflet designed by Mary Quant in 1965, in a collection of about 27 designs that she did for Courtelle knitting yarns (though I knitted it in cotton -  DMC Natura, which is 4-ply/fingering weight).   It appealed to me because it's a neat little sweater in an interesting stitch pattern (it's knitted in a twisted rib), and I like the neckline.

Lee Target 6565

The rest of this post is technical stuff about the details of the original design and the changes I made.  So if you're not a knitter (and assuming that you've got this far), you might not want to read any further.

The stitch pattern is a knit 3, purl 2 rib, but on right side rows you knit into the back of the knit stitches so that they are twisted. The twisting tightens up the knit stitches, though overall the fabric is still very stretchy. The hem and cuffs are done in the same stitch, but on smaller needles. I think it's a really nice effect - the twisting gives it a lively texture.

   

The neckband is knitted in twisted garter stitch, which I had never met before.  Unlike the twisted rib, the twisted stitches aren't evident, on either side of the work, but they give a much tighter fabric than plain garter stitch, and so a firmer neckband.

I made a few changes to the pattern:  I made both sleeves and body longer. In the original pattern, the sweater was intended to finish more or less on the waist.  The only shaping came from some increases at the sides after the first 6 inches of knitting the body.  I wanted my sweater to be longer, so I needed it to be hip-width around the hem.   So I started with more stitches than in the pattern, and then decreased for the waist.  But rather than putting the decreases at the side seams, I concealed them in the rib: I put the extra stitches in the purl ribs and then gradually removed them.  It's a very neat way of increasing and decreasing when you're knitting a rib stitch. The decreases are hardly visible on the right side, even if you know where to look, though they are more obvious on the wrong side.    

Waist shaping on wrong side

I didn't do any increases above the waist - I decided that the stretchiness of the fabric would be  enough.  And it is.

It looks good, it's nice to wear.  I like the fact that it 's a cool and trendy Mary Quant design (only 50 years late).  Now for my other unfinished projects....    

Wendy and Robin in miniskirts

In the 1960s, Mary Quant was one of the foremost fashion designers in London, widely credited with popularising the miniskirt.  She also produced two collections of designs for hand-knitters and crocheters to make for themselves, in Courtelle yarns.  Three of the designs appear in Wendy pattern leaflets in 1965: the preamble to the instructions says: "This is a Mary Quant design, one of the collection created exclusively for Wendy in Courtelle.  Mary Quant, famous as a pace-setter in the fashion world, has now brought her originality and flair to handknitting." 

Wendy 555 

According to notes on the archive copies held by Thomas B Ramsden & Co. (who now own Wendy), 15,000 copies of Wendy leaflet 555 were sold, more than twice as many as either of the other two Mary Quant leaflets.  That seems a bit surprising, because making the dress would take a lot of work.  It's also not a project for beginners - the skirt of the dress is knitted, and the rest of the outfit is crocheted, so you need both skills.  (And crocheting knee socks sounds fairly advanced - I've never got much past granny squares in crochet, so I can't judge.)   So I do wonder how many people actually made and wore the complete outfit, including the bonnet and knee socks.

The other two 1965 designs are more straightforward: Wendy 556 (below) is a crochet blazer with contrast edgings, and there's also a ribbed sweater with bands of contrast colour, which could be tackled by someone without much knitting experience.   But perhaps they didn't sell so well because they were seen as less distinctive.  

Wendy 556

In 1966, Mary Quant designed another collection of knitting patterns, including three for Wendy and three for Robin.  They are distinguished from the 1965 patterns by the fact that all the models have sharp geometric Vidal Sassoon haircuts - a style that was associated with Mary Quant after she adopted it herself in 1964.

Wendy 602

Three of the 1966 patterns are dresses, with matching stockings or socks. I don't like stockings at all, especially not thick knitted ones, and the thought of hand-knitting a pair is horrifying.  But ignoring the knitted stockings, I think the dress in Wendy 602 looks good (on a slim model, of course).   I don't personally think that knitted dresses are practical, and I rarely wear dresses anyway. But I could imagine converting it to a short-sleeved sweater with bands of stranded knitting.  (Or is it just me looking back nostalgically on the 1960s?)


Also among the 1966 designs for Wendy and Robin are a knitted jacket, with contrast crochet edging and another pair of matching knee socks, and two long-sleeved sweaters.  Robin 1559 (below) is a plain sweater in a raised rib pattern, with smocking on each shoulder.  The smocking is a 1960s detail which I think is too fussy combined with the plainness of the rest of the design - I'd prefer it without the smocking.  My favourite, though, is still Robin 1560 - a bold all-over geometric design in stranded knitting (described as "Fair Isle"), which I described in an earlier post here.

Robin 1559

I've been tracking down the Mary Quant patterns for some time, and they almost all have something distinctive about them.   I like the fact that they are mostly not simple knits for beginners, and several of them have some element that would be technically novel for many knitters - stranded knitting, or smocking, or the combination of knitting and crochet.  And especially, knitting socks in the round - not a common accomplishment for young women at the time.  I think that the knitters who tried these designs might have found that their skills improved a lot as a result, which must be a good thing.

I have just started knitting another of the Mary Quant designs.  It is a sweater in a wide rib, where the knit stitches on the right side of the work are twisted.  Not difficult, but new to me.  More on that later. 

Sorting Robin Leaflets

At the end of November/beginning of December I missed a couple of days working at Lee Mills, for various reasons, so I brought some pattern leaflets home to sort.  I decided to work on the Robin pattern leaflets, which as far as I knew had never been sorted at all.  There were 7 boxes altogether.  Mostly, they were completely mixed leaflets that had been put into the Robin boxes as we were sorting leaflets by spinner, although it turned out that at least one of the boxes had already been partly sorted into numerical order (before my time at Lee Mills). 

Unpacking the boxes and sorting roughly

I finished sorting them all just before Christmas - they were spread out over the attic floor for quite a while.  At first, sorting 7 boxes of leaflets takes a lot more room than the original boxes did, and gradually they get tidier and eventually they go back into new boxes.  The final step is to record the numbers of all the leaflets, so that I can see how many there are and what proportion of the total we have.

Sorting in progress

Completely sorted

Now that the counting is done, I can tell you that we have just over 2000 different Robin pattern leaflets.  (Excluding the later leaflets on A4 paper, which I am ignoring for now.)  They date from the 1930s or 1940s, to about the late 1970s.  Some of the leaflets are really attractive - the earliest leaflets, in particular, are beautifully produced.  Some of them, especially from the 1970s, seem astonishingly awful, with the benefit of hindsight.  More of that later.

 And if you want to know, sorting all those took me just under 24 hours in total.  It's slow work.  

While I was sorting all these leaflets, I was looking for the Mary Quant designs from 1965 and 1966.  As with the Emu leaflets, I found just one, although I know that more were produced.  Robin leaflet 1560 is from the 1966 collection. It's described as a Fair Isle sweater, though the design is nothing like a traditional Fair Isle, the yarn is nothing like Shetland wool, and the colours are not traditional either.  But it's a very nice design. 
 

Robin 1560 by Mary Quant

Looking For Mary Quant

Emu 2561 - designed by Mary Quant

Last week at Lee Mills, I was searching for Emu pattern leaflets designed by Mary Quant.  She did two collections of knitting & crochet patterns for Courtelle, in 1965 and 1966, and Emu was one of the spinners involved.  I found one of the Emu patterns a few months ago, but I know there should be about 5 more.  I looked in the Emu boxes that we have already sorted - nothing there.  So last week, I searched the four boxes of Emu patterns that we haven't yet sorted.  And I still haven't found any more.  

It was disappointing, but not altogether surprising. Even though we have upwards of 50,000 different pattern leaflets (that's my current estimate), that still means that there are a lot that we don't have.  And the leaflets in the collection have almost all been used, so that it's representative of what knitters and crocheters chose to buy.  We are most likely to have the leaflets that sold well.  Although the Mary Quant patterns were stylish and fashionable, I suspect that they didn't sell in large numbers.  They would appeal to young women who wanted to make themselves a high-fashion outfit cheaply (or who could persuade their mothers to make one for them), but that might have been quite a small constituency.  And there were 27 leaflets in each collection to choose from, which would reduce the number of potential buyers for each one still further.

 

Ad for Emu 2562

Even so, I did hope to find more - especially as I have seen an ad for another of the Emu patterns, which you might expect to increase sales.  (That's what advertising is for, right?)

My fruitless search for Mary Quant patterns wasn't wasted effort, though. While I was looking for them, I did some rough sorting and in the process, added to my small collection of patterns celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.  After that, I finished sorting the Emu patterns from the 1940s and 1950s (about 500 of them) - I'll write about the 1940s patterns another time.

Emu 3234 - Jubilee 77

And I also sorted some Sirdar patterns, with some Huddersfield University students who are working at Lee Mills, and another Roger Moore pattern turned up.  (I don't think the pipe suits him.)

Sirdar 1390 with Roger Moore