It's 1965 and London is about to become the capital of cool.

Designer Mary Quant is watching the fashionable girls of Chelsea go by from the window of her shop, Bazaar. Their hemlines seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Inspired, Mary gets to work and what she comes up with many will find deeply shocking. It’s the miniskirt.

In episode eight of Torn, Gus Casely-Hayford finds that media, society and feminists can never agree on whether the miniskirt is a good thing. Fashion historian Valerie Steele draws parallels with the 1920s when feminist disagreed over whether the knee-length flapper skirt was frivolous, or favourable to feminism. 


Gus discovers that when Mary Quant popularised the miniskirt in the 1960s, no matter what the papers or parents had to say about them, girls and young women were desperate to get their hands on one. Eve Shrewsbury was one of them, and she shocked the older generation in her village in rural Northamptonshire by wearing a miniskirt. Fast forward to 2019 when Clara Mitchell decides to wear a miniskirt to high school in Little Rock, Arkansas and the controversy surrounding her decision goes viral.

Presenter: Gus Casely-Hayford
Executive Producer: Rosie Collyer
Producer: Tiffany Cassidy
Assistant Producer: Nadia Mehdi
Production Coordinator: Francesca Taylor
Sound Design: Rob Speight

A Novel production for BBC Radio 4 Show less