"Okay, Crackerby."

I'm searching the Life Magazine archive for 1960s articles about Mary Quant. (Mary Quant died yesterday.) There's one in particular that I think I remember.

I haven't found what I'm looking for yet, but I did stop and marvel at a page of the September 17, 1965 issue, where ABC-TV is running a contest that draws attention to 4 of its new TV shows, one of which is hilariously unfamiliar:

"Young women at the time were turning their backs on the corseted shapes of their mothers, with their nipped waists and ship’s-prow chests — the shape of Dior..."

"... which had dominated since 1947. They disdained the uniform of the establishment — the signifiers of class and age telegraphed by the lacquered helmets of hair, the twin sets and heels, and the matchy-matchy accessories — the model for which was typically in her 30s, not a young gamine like Ms. Quant."

I'm reading — with tears in my eyes — "Mary Quant, British Fashion Revolutionary, Dies at 93/Known as the mother of the miniskirt, clad in her signature play clothes and boots, with huge painted eyes, fake freckles and a bob, she epitomized London’s Swinging Sixties" (NYT).

Thank you, Mary Quant! Thanks for the great joy of the very best fashion — in my subjective experience — the most fun, the most relief from formality and stodginess.

And thanks to the NYT writer, Penelope Green, for coming up with "nipped waists and ship’s-prow chests" to express so concisely what felt great to rebel against.

Futurism was much cheekier then:

"He leaves Marseille. He steals a car. He wants to sleep with the girl again. She doesn’t. In the end, he either dies or leaves — to be decided."

That's what Jean-Luc Godard put on paper for Jean-Paul Belmondo for "Breathless," and the rest was improvisation, according to Belmondo, quoted in "Jean-Paul Belmondo, jaunty star of New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’ dies at 88" (WaPo).

He added that he was comfortable with a film almost wholly dependent on improvisation. “If I’m told exactly how to do everything,” he said, “I become stiff and uncomfortable.” He embraced Godard’s suggestion to “play around” with the character. 

Knowing that Mr. Belmondo liked to shadowbox in character, Godard filmed him boxing in front of a mirror as he experimented with his lines: “I’m not much of a looker, but I’m quite a boxer.” 

The film — sexy, witty, youthful and fatalistic — became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Belmondo became the subject of articles chronicling “le belmondisme,” his appealing air of insouciance.

AND: There's much to say about Jean-Paul Belmondo, but this is a blog, so I'll just say one thing that is important to me. He makes a prominent appearance in the Donovan song "Sunny South Kensington" — (on the delightful "Mellow Yellow" album). 

The chorus begins with the name Jean-Paul Belmondo:

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mary Quant got stoned to say the least 

Ginsberg, he ended up dry and so he took a trip out East

What's in the verses? We're invited to take a walk in the London neighborhood of South Kensington, "a groovy place to live." Donovan points out the various characters — girl in a silk blouse who "ain't no freak," "a fella with a cane umbrella" — and tells us how we might act: "flip out, skip out, trip out" and "spread your wings."

Ginsberg is presumably Allen Ginsberg, who was famously in London in 1965. The "Mellow Yellow" album came out in 1966. When did Ginsberg go to India and why? We could read this from an Indian website from 2019: "Disillusioned with America, did the poet Allen Ginsberg find an antidote to rationality in India?" ("India turned his attention 'away from his cosmic obsessions and toward the humanity around him in the swarming streets of Kolkata and Varanasi'"). 

As for Mary Quant, she was celebrated last year in at the V&A South Kensington Museum — South Kensington, the place where Donovan pictured her stoned in 1966 — and here's the museum's video, intended to capture that 60s vibe, half a century after the fact:

 

I can attest to the fact that the false eyelashes I'm wearing in that picture I used in the sidebar on my now defunct blog The Time That Blog Forgot were Mary Quant eyelashes. The photo was taken by my father in 1968, when I would have been thrilled to wear anything and everything Mary Quant, and my Aunt Dorothy, who lived in London, sent me those eyelashes.