Materially different
He was one of the hottest names in fashion for 20 years, dressing everyone from Princess Margaret to Diana Rigg. Then John Bates gave it all up to paint. On the eve of a retrospective, Brenda Polan meets the man who really invented the miniskirt
There's long been division in the ranks of fashion historians over who invented the miniskirt. Some insist it was André Courrèges in Paris; others assert it was Mary Quant in London. One authority who was there at the time, however, was certain it was someone else entirely.
Ernestine Carter, while based in London, was an American, beady of eye and unswayed by cross-Channel chauvinism. She was the fashion editor of the Sunday Times and, reporting from Paris in 1967, she started her article by confiding how boring it was eternally jotting next to her sketches and notes: 'But John Bates did that first!' John Bates doesn't quite demur but he does say: 'A lot of fashion is in the air and everybody plucks it out of the air at the same time. But I do think that sensitivity to fashion's mood is a very English thing.'
We are sitting in the dining-room of his home in Wales. The walls are white and covered with paintings, some his own and some the booty of a lifetime of collecting. Through the interior window to the kitchen we are just aware of his partner, John Siggins, bustling about the business of cooking supper.
John Bates was one of the key designers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. He is still, in his late sixties, very handsome, with an elegance of body and gesture only the long-limbed have, and is a modest man, almost self-effacing until someone egregiously fails to give him his due. So the fact that the Museum of Costume in Bath, where an exhibition of his work opens on 14 July, seems to be billing him rather as the forgotten man of the 'youthquake' is slightly galling. No true student of fashion has forgotten John Bates.
He was born in Northumberland in 1938. His brothers followed his father down the pit but somehow the family knew John would be different. 'My dad offered to take me down the mine once, to show me what I was missing, but I asked him: "Why would I want to do that?" I knew I wanted to go to London. I had no clear idea what I wanted to do but I was certain I was going to do it in London.'
As his National Service drew to a close, a friend asked him what he was going to do. Bates concluded that he might try fashion as he had always designed a bit for his mother. The friend knew Herbert Sidon, a society couturier. 'He had a huge archive of magazines,' Bates remembers, 'and he told me to study it, paying particular attention to Balenciaga, Givenchy and Molyneux and why those clothes lasted while others didn't. I recognised that the answer was simplicity; a strong, clean silhouette.'
In 1959, Bates set up the Jean Varon label. Whether he invented the miniskirt or whether it was blowing in the wind for sensitives like him and Courrèges and Quant to pluck out simultaneously, Bates was probably the most influential designer of the 1960s. He dressed Diana Rigg in The Avengers, and that alone affords him iconic status among fashion historians and fans of forceful women and slick fabrics.
He did the shortest mini-dresses. He was the first to advocate bralessness, and the first to bare the midriff. He loved to play the arrogant dictator of fashion. 'I think everything should show,' he said in 1964. 'Nothing should go underneath. All a girl needs is something to hold up her stockings.' I tell him that a decade's bralessness is something my generation tends to regret, what with gravity and all. He doesn't budge.
He had the ability to inspire why-oh-why columnists, as well as adoring fashion writers. 'Newspapers loved stirring up a storm about indecency. But the mini was innocent. It was never tarty. There's this idea that male designers love to make women look ridiculous. But most gay boys look at the female body in the most positive way and want to make it alluring.'
All through the 1970s, when he launched a label under his own name, Bates dressed royalty and society women, including Princesses Margaret and Alexandra. He dressed great actresses - Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips, Julie Christie - as well as Cleo Laine and Dusty Springfield.
He and Siggins moved to Wales four years ago and Bates began to paint. His subjects are people, always done from life. 'When we used to go to parties,' says Bates, 'John would work the room but I'd fade into the wall and watch. He'd tell me to stop staring. But it's not staring. It's looking hard. It's what a painter does. A designer must do the same. You can tell a garment designed on the body and one done on a dummy. The former has movement, life. The other doesn't.'
For John Bates the bodies have always been lithe and lovely. And they have always moved.
Totally Alice in Wonderland! 
Having to ship longer hem lengths to the US is so funny!
