Accounting for flood risk would lower
American house prices by $187bn
→
Unpriced flood risk inflates home values the most in rural, inland parts of America
Flood insurance*, $bn
Direct property damage, $bn
Property under/over-valuation, as % of total fair market value
*National Flood Insurance Programme Sources: “Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in
US housing markets”, by Jesse Gourevitch et al.,
Nature Climate Change
, March 2023; First Street Foundation; Sheldus.org
22
10
2000
90
1978
MO
SD
PA
ND
NM
WA
MN
WI
WY
NE
CA
NY
VT
NH
KY
MI
MT
FL
TX
LA
MS
GA
SC
NC
VA
WV
AR
TN
AL
AZ
NV
OR
KS
OK
IN
IL
ME
ID
UT
OH
IA
CO
Homes at the feet of the
Appalachian mountains are
vulnerable to flash floods
↓ Montana does not
require sellers of homes
to disclose flood risks
Florida alone accounts
for $50bn of overvaluation
Mississippi
Along the Llano river,
expected damage from
floods exceeds current sale
prices for the median home
0
-6
1
2.5 5
10 20 42
100
0
50
21
10
2000
90
80
70
1960
125
25
75
Other natural disasters
Flood-related
No data
20
15
10
5
0
5
Premiums
Payouts
Los Angeles
012
The Economist
April 22nd 2023
82
Obituary
Mary Quant
T
unics were
at the back. Once you had worked through the im
mense Butterick pattern catalogue, past pages of pastel Aline
dresses or tightskirted suits, suddenly the look changed. It be
came rectangular, plain, sleek and very short, and if you were a
teenager in the early 1960s that was what you wanted. Your parents
would never buy such clothes for you, but if you were determined
you would make them yourself. Out on the lounge floor you’d
spread the fabric, a shock of scarlet, orange or electric blue, and in
a few days you, too, would be wearing Mary Quant.
Wearing it, over a poloneck and contrasting tights (oh, the joy
of losing that fiddly suspender belt!), made you feel different. You
were not a version of your mother any more. You were modern.
Even more so when you plastered down your hair with spray,
framed your eyes with kohl and piled on the mascara. High boots,
if you had them, perfected the look. Now you could stride.
At the start of her career Mary Quant, too, spent hours on her
bedsit floor pinning and cutting. She worked at night to restock
her first shop, Bazaar, in the King’s Road in Chelsea, with a bouilla
baisse of racy clothes. By evening the rails would be almost
stripped, and she would rush to Harrods to get fabrics for the next
day. Out of men’s suitings, in tweed or grey flannel, she would
make pinafores; striped shirting was cut into dresses. She ran up
culottes, knickerbockers and lounge pyjamas, and had fun with
footwide waistbands, broad stripes and huge polka dots. Her
bestseller was a white plastic Peter Pan collar, to add demure lit
tlegirlishness to each eyesmacking ensemble.
She also sold miniskirts. They went like wildfire, getting ever
shorter because her leggy Chelsea customers demanded it. She de
signed them long before André Courrèges, in his Paris show in
1964, made them respectable. They were not respectable with her.
Wickedly, they teased men, as did her long cardigans worn as very
short dresses, and in 1966 her crutchhugging minipants. Ap
palled City types in bowler hats would pass Bazaar, with its open
door blaring out jazz and its window of cavorting mannequins,
and cry “Disgusting!”, beating their umbrellas on the glass.
Inside, though, dowagers competed with middleclass girls to
buy Quant by the armful, and the
haut monde
of the day—Tony
ArmstrongJones, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, Brigitte Bardot,
the odd Beatle or Rolling Stone—would drop in to the running
cocktail party. She was her own best advertisement, gamine and
frisky, especially when Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser of the mo
ment, snipped her hair into a bob, and when Terence Donovan, the
hot photographer, snapped her (as here). She and her equally
mouldbreaking business partnerhusband, Alexander Plunket
Greene, loved to hear people sneer “God! Modern Youth!”. Swing
ing London was their new world, and they were dressing it.
This was also serious stuff, for her. She was shy, and always had
been, but through clothes she could express herself. Already, at
six, she was making her own dresses out of bedspreads. At school
she recast her uniform. The Quant look came from a tapdancer at
her childhood ballet class who wore a long black jumper, black
tights, white socks and no skirt to speak of; she liked skinny, lively
monochrome ever after. At Goldsmiths College she decided to ig
nore what was happening in Paris, creating clothes solely for her
self and her friends. In pursuit of fashion she was constantly look
ing for the next, best, thing: a colour or fabric that had been forgot
ten, a shirt that could be tied like a scarf, a natural pattern she
could blow up large. As she walked she might pick up a conker,
leaves, a brass hook, bits of ribbon and mesh from factory floors.
Even a rubber doorstop would set her mind working.
Fashion also gave her a living, surprisingly enough. Her par
ents, Welsh schoolteachers who had moved to London, thought
the business dicey and dodgy. Neither she nor Alexander had
much idea about money, and it was only his aristocratic income
that enabled them to set up Bazaar in 1955 with the help of another
useful friend, exlawyer Archie McNair. But in ten days the origi
nal stock had sold out, and in the first week the shop made £500.
Two more London outlets came quickly and, in 1962, a deal with
J.C. Penney to link up with 1,765 stores in America. By 1963 the
Quant brand was global, with revenues of £14m; in 2000 her make
up arm was bought out by a Japanese company, in a country where
her look was also adored. Sensibly, she went early into masspro
duction and discounting. Moneytalk embarrassed her, but she
and Alexander—with no furniture except a bed and deckchairs
when they married in 1957—certainly rose fast in the world.
That love affair too had been made by fashion, when Alexander
wandered into classes at Goldsmiths in his mother’s gold silk pyja
mas. For both of them, eccentric dressing was a powerful tool for
getting through life. It could be a disguise, and her range of cos
metics, with colours as vivid as her clothes, were really pots of the
atrical paint made tiny for a handbag. Or it could be a bold an
nouncement of things to come. When she set up Bazaar in a grey
Britain not long out of rationing, a place of bombsites and pea
souper fogs, her shop immediately looked alive, with music and
colours that sang of the world to be. Fashion changed first.
It also changed women, once the new look took hold. Not just
because they could playfully imitate men, by borrowing men’s tai
loring and their cardigans, but mostly because minidresses freed
them to move. She designed them, she said, to be alive in. More
important still, high hemlines, paired with opaque tights, let girls
run for the bus in order to get to work. You could never run for the
bus in a Dior dress. In Quant, women felt they could leave the
house and dare a different life.
When people credited her with that revolution, though, she ob
jected. Times were coming to a boil and she just happened to be
there, giving women more of what they already wanted. Her cus
tomers were the real revolutionaries; they, and the teenage girls
who cut and stitched her designs on sittingroom floors across the
land, kohlrimmed eyes gleaming, eager to stride outside.
n
The look of an era
Dame Mary Quant, designer of the clothes that made the
Sixties swing, died on April 13th, aged 93
012
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