Miniskirt young women to whom they were unrelated, but to oppose it on their own wives and fiancés. In the UK, by shortening the skirts to less than they were classed as children's garments rather than adult clothes. Children's clothing was not subject to purchase tax whereas adult clothing was. The avoidance of tax meant that the price was correspondingly less. Several designers have been credited with the invention of the 1960s miniskirt, most significantly the London-based designer Mary Quant and the Parisian André Courrèges. Although Quant reportedly named the skirt after her favourite make of car, the Mini, there is
British popular music bands, who provided a social and popular music that began to dominate social occasions and the radio airwaves. By 1950 indigenous forms of British popular music were already giving way to the influence of American forms of music including jazz, swing and traditional pop, mediated through film and records. The significant change of the mid-1950s was the impact of American rock and roll, which provided a new model for performance and recording, based on a youth market. Initially this was dominated by American acts, or re-creations of American forms of music, but soon distinctly British forms began to appear, first