Mary Quant’s Sixties Daisy Finds a New Home on New Era’s Softest Cap

A third round of Mary Quant x New Era headwear trades the brand’s usual pastels for black and white, letting six decades of daisy branding speak for itself.

Mary Quant and New Era are an odd enough pairing that the fit only really makes sense once you see it: a British womenswear house built on 1960s Chelsea rebellion, licensing its most recognizable symbol onto a company that has spent a century making the literal on-field cap for Major League Baseball. Their collide  is not a one-off. A first run launched in Japan in April 2024 with two 9THIRTY caps, a bucket hat, a large-capacity backpack, and a die-cut pouch shaped like the cap itself, all built around New Era’s then-standard 9THIRTY sil before the model’s spring/summer 2025 redesign broadened its visor curve and deepened its crown. A second, larger drop followed in May 2025, opening with online pre-orders on May 14 ahead of a May 28 nationwide launch, and expanding the lineup to ten pieces: two Tee colorways at 8,250 yen each, oversized “BIG” tees at 8,800 yen, a “BIG Daisy” 9THIRTY cap in three colorways at 7,480 yen, a three-tier logo cap in black or beige at the same price, a knit bucket hat in three colors at 8,800 yen, a daisy-point cap clip at 2,750 yen, a die-cut pouch matching the BIG Daisy cap’s graphic at 4,950 yen, and two backpacks at 18,700 and 19,800 yen. Every piece across both drops sold through Mary Quant’s own retail channels rather than New Era’s, and both were positioned as seasonal capsules timed to spring and early summer rather than standing year-round items. This new rel, arriving September 16 at Mary Quant shops and the brand’s online store nationwide in Japan, continues that cadence with a cap built entirely around an all-over embroidered daisy pattern, this time stripped down to black, white, and gray rather than the brighter accent colors the first two collide leaned on.

 

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Mary Quant opened her first Bazaar boutique on London’s King’s Road in 1955 with her husband Alexander Plunket Greene and business partner Archie McNair, initially reselling wholesale stock before frustration with what was avail pushed her into designing her own clothes. The trio’s roles split naturally: Quant handled design, Plunket Greene brought marketing instinct, and McNair supplied legal and business grounding, a combination that let a single Chelsea boutique grow into what Vogue at the time called part of London’s “youthquake.” Through the following decade Quant built the look now inseparable with Swinging London, cred with popularizing the miniskirt and later hot pants, while also branching into tights, rainwear, and swimwear collect that pushed her name well past clothing alone.

Back View Of Light Gray Mary Quant X New Era Hoodie With Large New Era Logo

In 1966, the same year she received an OBE and published her autobiography Quant by Quant, Quant formally registered the daisy as her company’s trademark and launched Mary Quant Cosmetics alongside it. The flower was chosen for how quickly it read: a designer logo, in the modern branding sense, was still a fairly new idea at the time, and the daisy’s simplicity made it one of the first symbols effective enough to anchor licensing deals across entirely different product categories. That strategy produced everything from Mary Quant hosiery and berets designed for Kangol to the Daisy fashion doll, named directly after the logo, which carried Quant’s design sensibility to a generation of children who might never buy her clothes. It’s the same licensing logic, essentially unchanged six decades later, that now extends the daisy onto a New Era cap. Mary Quant Cosmetics has been especially durable in Japan specifically, where the brand built out more than 200 standalone Colour shops by the early 2000s and where the daisy remains one of the most recognized Western fashion logos in the country’s cosmetics and lifestyle retail, a foundation that makes fashion crossovers like this one a regular part of the brand’s Japanese calendar rather than a novelty.

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New Era has a completely separate history, one rooted in utility rather than fashion. German immigrant Ehrhardt Koch founded the company in Buffalo, New York in 1920 after borrowing startup capital from his sister, initially produce Gatsby-style fashion caps under the name E. Koch Cap Company before renaming it New Era two years later. The pivot that defined the brand came in the early 1930s, when Koch’s son Harold noticed baseball’s growing popularity outpace demand for the fashion caps the company had built its business on, and steered New Era toward its first professional baseball cap, made for the Cleveland Indians in 1934. That decision eventually made New Era the exclusive on-field cap supplier for MLB, a relationship that has held since 1993, and later extended to sideline rights with the NFL in 2012 and on-court rights with the NBA in 2016, making New Era the only company in sports history to hold exclusive on-field, sideline, and on-court headwear rights across all three leagues at once.

Alongside that sports-supplier identity, New Era built a second, arguably louder reputation as a streetwear staple, driven largely by its 59FIFTY fitted cap and, in particular, by the New York Yankees cap becoming a hip-hop and global fashion fixture from the 1990s onward, a shift the company’s own archivists trace back to the label moving its production and design focus back toward Buffalo and away from a purely functional, sport-first identity. That crossover appeal has made New Era a frequent collaborator well outside sports, in Japan especially, where its own online store regularly runs limited drops with everything from anime and manga franchises to regional streetwear labels and individual illustrators, releasing new collide items on a near-weekly cadence throughout the year. It’s that second identity, the one built through partnerships rather than league contracts, that a licensing-driven brand like Mary Quant is plug directly into, and it places this cap alongside a genuinely wide range of neighbors on New Era’s own rel calendar, from a Timberland collection to character tie-ins for properties like Kingdom and Harry Potter.

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The 9THIRTY sits apart from New Era’s more structure profile by design. Where the 59FIFTY and 9FIFTY keep a stiff, boxy crown built for a true fit look, the 9THIRTY uses a softer, unstructure build with a shallow profile that molds closer to the head over time, paired with an adjust strap at the back rather than a fixed size. New Era refreshed the model for its spring/summer 2025 season specifically, widening the pre-curved visor and slightly deepening the crown to improve the fit without sacrificethat soft, low-profile sil, changes that would have applied to this September rel as well as the label’s standard catalog. That combination of adjust and a relax shape makes the 9THIRTY a natural fit for a fashion collaboration aimed at a broad customer base rather than a specific head size, and it’s the same model New Era has used for prior artist and brand tie-ins, including a run with Japanese illustrator Shohei Ochiai that similarly replace the standard New Era wordmark on the front panels with a fully custom graphic rather than a small logo patch.

For the Mary Quant collaboration, that soft crown becomes the canvas. Rather than a small daisy logo patch in one corner, the front panel and surrounding crown carry an all-over embroider daisy motif that covers the view surface of the cap, continue a treatment Mary Quant and New Era introduce together on the “BIG Daisy” caps from the 2025 drop. On those earlier releases, the flower’s scale and repetition across the crown did the visual work a standard logo cap usually leaves to color contrast alone, essential turn the daisy trademark itself into the cap’s pattern rather than its branding. Scaling that same all-over embroidery approach onto a single flat colorway, rather than mixing it against a bold accent shade, is what distinguishes this release from either of the two that came before it.

Burgundy Mary Quant X New Era Adjustable Cap With Black Embroidered Logo

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Every prior Mary Quant x New Era release has leaned on the label’s signature high-contrast palette, usually black paired with white, pink, or beige, with the daisy embroidery reading as a graphic accent against a solid base. The 2025 BIG Daisy cap, for instance, came in black, a black-and-white split, and pink, while that same drop’s three-tier logo cap stuck to a plainer black-or-beige split without any daisy graphic at all. This rel narrows that approach further, working entirely in monotone rather than mixing in a brighter accent shade the way both early drops did across at least one colorway. The daisy embroider itself becomes the primary texture of the cap instead of a highlight detail, letting the pattern’s density and repetition carry the design rather than a color contrast doing that work.

It’s a treatment more in line with how Mary Quant Cosmetics has handled its own household and lifestyle goods in recent seasons, several of which have used all-black-and-white daisy patterns specifically, pairing a matte monotone finish with the flower motif scattered across lunch bags, water bottles, and handkerchiefs to read as more grown-up than the brand’s typically brighter youth-market pieces. That same shift toward shh, more adult daisy treatment tracks with putting the design on a cap meant to pair with a wider range of everyday outfits rather than one specific seasonal look, position this rel closer to an everyday accessory than a collectible statement piece the way the BIG Daisy cap’s bolder pink colorway leaned.

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The Mary Quant x New Era “Daisy Embroidery” 9THIRTY rel September 16, 2026 at Mary Quant shops and the brand’s official online store across Japan, continue the pattern set by the first two collides, both of which launch exclusive through Mary Quant’s own retail network rather than through New Era’s stores, with online pre-orders typical open ahead of the in-store date. If that pattern holds again here, a pre-order window through Mary Quant’s own online shop would be the more likely first point of purchase for anyone hoping to secure the cap before it reaches physical stores nationwide.