Growing up as a child in London during the “swinging sixties” was a most exciting time. As the song once famously said “England swings like a pendulum”, and it was most certainly true. Fashion together with pop music (remember the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?), became Britain’s biggest export, and walking down the High Street to school every morning was a great way to see everything that was exciting about sixties fashion and my country, develop before my eyes.

So what was fashion really like in the sixties? Well, the honest answer is, that certainly for ordinary working people, the first five years were pretty similar to the preceding decade. Women wore straight shift dresses to just below the knee, or longer length, pleated skirts with short sleeved blouses and cardigans. The ubiquitous twinset and pearls with a pencil skirt, was still worn in the office, and trousers were only ever for weekends and casual wear, never for business. Hats were still expected to be worn for weddings and any formal occasion, and updo was usually short and permed, with women attending the hairdresser every six or eight weeks for a “shampoo and set”. So, all in all, the early sixties was still a decade for formality and propriety in fashion.

All that changed in the mid-sixties, when British designer Mary Quant developed the mini-skirt. Most people believe that Mary invented the mini.This is not quite correct, as shorter skirts had been appearing on the catwalks at French fashion shows for a couple of years previously, but Mary made them even shorter and sold them cheaply in her London store Bazaar, thus starting a fashion craze that shook the world. Combined with the invention of tights (or panty-hose as they are more commonly called in the States), the mini ushered in a new free age for womens’ fashion. Before tights, women had been constrained in tight corsets, and skirts had to be of at least a certain length to avoid showing the top of your stockings. Now, skirts could be as short as a woman dared to wear them, and by 1967, London was full of young girls with skirts that I recall my Grandmother disapprovingly calling “pelmets”.

The 60′s was not just about the mini though. Hair styles changed too. After decades of perming, that ruined the hair, it was suddenly popular to have your updo straight. For some, that meant long and flowing like model Jean Shrimpton. For others, it was short, easy-to-manage, geometric cuts as worn by Mary Quant herself, and the iconic