Perhaps the greatest boost to London design was the coming of the boutique, a small independent retail outlet that meant that designers could also be their own retailers. For once, clothes designers had the advantage: by being in control of both production and the point of sale they have liberated themselves from the need to compromise their work to satisfy conventional in-store buyers. This freedom of expression allowed them to experiment in an unprecedented way with new materials and designs. A few wild ideas could be stitched together at home and tried out the local boutique. A profusion of fashion boutiques like Quorum, Foale & Tuffin, Mr Fish, Mr Freedom, Countdown and Annacat were soon clustered around the Kings Road and Carnaby Street, a colourful part of the new returning culture in London that had a very strong design emphasis. Habitat was the huge and immediate success story in home furnishings.

Mary Quant’s Bazaar, the first boutique, had opened on the Kings Road in 1955, jointly financed by Alexander Plunkett Green and Archie McNaire who was the owner of Britain's first coffee bar, so on the Kings Road. Mary Quant was the pioneer of fashionable clothing for the younger generation. Her philosophy was ‘the young should look like the young… the old could, if they wished, look like the young, but the young must not, on any account look like the old’.

Traditional British couture studiously avoided synthetics because its clients held firm to the prejudice that they were inferior and low class fabrics, a view that still makes many of the current generation of couture clients recoil in horror at the mention of nylon or polyester. Synthetics just did not sit comfortably with the British couture ethic, but it was a totally different story at the younger end of the market where they were the most relevant design fabrics. Never had the generations been so polarised.