Farewell! Mary Quant!
This is a true story I heard, when I worked for ICI.
Do you remember those horrible drip-dry shirts, that men used to wear in the 1960s?
I suspect I took some to University, as my mother felt I could wash them.
Did you know that Mary Quant was partly responsible for their demise?
Mathematics tell us, that a pair of tights need a lot more nylon, than a pair of stockings.
As Mary Quant got a lot more ladies wearing tights to go with mini-skirts, there was a shortage of nylon.
ICI, who made much of the UK’s nylon, decided unilaterally to divert nylon from men’s shirts to ladies’ hosiery.
Bye bye! Nylon shirts!
RIP Dame Mary
What Happened to Men’s Nylon Shirts?
Do you remember those awful drip-dry nylon shirts of the ninteen-sixties?
They were awful and I don’t think they did anything for attracting the opposite sex. Especially as they used to shine in the lights on the dance floor.
But why did they disappear?
It was all to do with mini-skirts.
Before women raised their hemlines and men’s heart rate, they used to wear stockings. But as skirts got shorter, you weren’t decent in stockings, so there was a swift move to tights. Look at the average pair of tights and they use perhaps more than twice as much nylon than the stockings they replace. And to make matters worse, you can’t use two odd ones to make a pair.
So the result was that the demand for nylon rocketed.
As you can’t build a new plant overnight, ICI and the other manufacturers had to get the nylon from somewhere.
So they diverted it from men’s shirts to ladies’ hosiery and killed one of the most abominable articles of men’s clothing.
The Anonymous Widower 