I missed the peak of Mary Quant’s fashion revolution – but we all live in the glow of her legacy

For so many of us, the name Mary Quant immediately conjures up the daisy logo that appeared on all her Quant products and is still as fresh as a… of course, that was always the point.

As a teenager in the north of England in the Seventies, I missed out on the heyday of Quant clothes; that all took place on Carnaby Street circa the mid-Sixties. But even a decade later, her influence was still felt in the boutiques of Blackpool – simple lines, bright colours, lots of shift dresses, plus the round-collared blouse with the puffed sleeves that you always managed to trail into your shepherd’s pie.

I may not have worn any Quant originals, but I wore plenty of Quant rip-offs, most of them covered in gravy.

Much more readily available up the M6 in the Seventies were her spin-off makeup and bubble bath ranges. Sadly, I couldn’t afford the iconic yellow tin of makeup crayons, so improvised unsuccessfully with my little brother’s wax numbers. Yet I still remember solemnly painting my nails plum coloured with her varnish. And I still have a collection of teenage treasures tucked safely away in a battered Mary Quant foaming bath oil box.

And now, the V&A Museum in London is hosting a look back in awe at Quant’s world and work.

What’s odd about the Quant phenomenon is how stylish and relevant she has continued to be even without trying anything new or different. In fact, the secret of her success seems remarkably simple: she knew her style and she stuck to it, to the extent that she has barely changed her style since it was cut into the sharpest of bobs back in the 1950’s.

Whilst everyone else went poodle-perm mad or experimented with culturally inappropriate Bo Derek braids, Mary kept cool under her trademark heavy fringe.

All creatives crave longevity; it’s all very well to burn bright and burn out, but what you really want is to live to see your own retrospective at one of the world’s leading museums. At 85, Quant can safely say she has achieved the ultimate life goal: she has left a legacy. She has given us Twiggy in hot pants and coloured tights, and introduced the duvet to the UK.

If she now wants to do nothing else but lie back on the sofa in a stained Matalan onesie watching Homes under the Hammer, she has still won. She can let herself go, she can grow her hair long and grey if she wants. Her job is done.

But thanks to the V&A, she has also left us a little something extra, and it’s free on the museum website. All you need is time, patience and a sewing machine.

Quant’s gift, as reinterpreted by the mother and daughter design team Alice and Co, is a free-to-download pattern based on one of her early best selling A-line shift dresses. This pattern has already been downloaded over 30,000 times by folk of all ages running up simple shift numbers and posting the results on social media, hashtagged #wewantquant.

How wonderful to be in your eighties and be able to look back at your career and know that during your lifetime, not only did you have a bus with your name on it, design the interior of a mini and put girls in properly waterproof PVC macs complete with matching boots, but that you’ve also inspired tens of thousands of people to take to the sewing machine and actually create an iconic piece of fashion at the kitchen table.

Among my immediate circle of friends, only two can really sew (as in tackle anything more complicated than attaching a button). The rest of us got left behind in uninspiring domestic science lessons when an entire term could be wasted sewing an apron. If I’d only been taught to make a skirt or a simple dress, I might have stuck at it – after all, you can’t go to a disco in an apron, especially not when it’s made in regulation school colours.

Since then, my only brush with a sewing machine came via a celebrity craft challenge a few months back, when Rufus Hound and I competed to make a kaftan from scratch out of a square of fabric at Kirsty Allsopp’s house. I can still feel the thrill of running a seam at full throttle, a sensation that weirdly reminded me of riding pillion on a Harley Davidson at 90mph.

In fact, come to think of it, if I really want to relive my youth, I’m not going to do it by running up Mary Quant-inspired frocks at my kitchen table, oh no! If I’m going to acquire yet another mid-life crisis hobby, sod the sewing machine. What I really want is a motorbike. It’s my 60th in a few months, so excuse me while I go and do some browsing.