With floral print dresses and household items, the British designer created a romantic and recognizable beauty that inspired many dressing tables and brands after decades.

Laura Ashley prairie dress in the 1970s. Credit...Courtesy of Laura Ashley

In 1952, a 28-year-old secretary participated in an exhibition of traditional handicrafts held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Especially inspired by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman told her husband when she returned home that she had never seen something similar in the store and wanted to try to make some similar styles by herself. The couple spent 10 pounds making screens, dyes and linens on wood. After reading some books in the teaching library, they began to silk-print textiles on the kitchen table in their small apartment in London. The next year, while waiting for the birth of their first child, they printed scarves, mainly because they had just returned from a trip to Italy, where young girls imitated Audrey Hepburn's role in "Roman Holiday" (1953), and Knot around them. neck. Orders from small shops on the main street soon flocked. Next, they used simple geometric patterns to make tea towels, napkins and placemats. Soon after, in March 1954, Laura and Bernard Ashley officially established Ashley Mountney Ltd.-Mountney is Laura's maiden name. But in the end, Bernard felt that a clear feminine name was more suitable for their products, so they renamed the company Laura Ashley.

By the mid-1980s, the family business that started as a DIY handicraft project had developed rapidly, with operations all over the world, employing 4,000 employees in more than 220 stores around the world and having annual revenues of approximately US$130 million. In other words: if you were a woman who grew up in the 80s or early 90s, then you might remember that the brand is famous for its floral chintz fashions and homewares. Maybe you have a Laura Ashley bedroom like me. My bedspreads, sheets, dust-proof frills and wallpapers all have Bramble patterns. The dark green ivy and royal blue strawberries are the backgrounds of my many teenagers' memories. Maybe you (or you and your mother) wore a dignified shabby floral print dress to church on Easter Sunday, or you wore a cotton button-down shirt with Peter Pan collar when you went to the mall. This style is often imitated. Princess Anna.

While other designers are ruthlessly focusing on metropolis and new things, Laura Ashley focuses on the Victorian past, its dignity and correspondingly modest styles, and the designer's final rustic style life. "Living in a remote place like me, I am not affected by the city," she once told an interviewer. "We just develop in our own way." In fact, the name "Laura Ashley" has long been a shorthand for rural romantic and evocative things. In recent years, such examples have been endless. In the field of fashion, the brand's influence is reflected in the new prairie style (see also: prairie girl, cutting-edge women, Amish chic, core copycat, traditional), popular by brands such as Batsheva, Horror Vacui, Dôen and LoveShackFancy; Wearing more exquisite, fairy-tale style dresses designed by Simone Rocha; in the eye-catching creations of a group of rising designers including Kika Vargas, Yuhan Wang and Sindiso Khumalo, they use luxurious fabrics and avant-garde The design integrates their own fashion and exquisite aesthetics into the aesthetics.

Home decor designers are also embracing the English country style and providing a warm and comfortable correction to minimalism. Check out the classic green, red or lilac striped textiles by interior designer Flora Soames, or the tableware collection launched by Mrs. Alice this summer with Matches Fashion, wicker picnic baskets with floral printed tablecloths. Horror Vacui is now selling a series of scallop edge patchwork fabrics, and LoveShackFancy has stepped into this field, launching exquisite, girlish bedding and wallpaper, and cooperating with A-Street Prints to develop the latter. More floral wallpapers can be found in the recent collaboration between flower stylist Willow Crossley and Barneby Gates, and the resulting hand-printed patterns are reminiscent of early Laura Ashley (Laura Ashley) textiles.

However, despite the brand’s lasting influence, few people seem to know that Laura Ashley — such as Liz Claiborne, Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan, and other designers of the same name — is a real woman, and More than just a nice name. Laura Monteney was born in Wales in 1925 and was raised in London by a civil servant father and a housewife mother. Her eldest daughter regretted that her housework art was not particularly skilled. Laura and her sister Mary often take the train to Wales to visit their grandmother and great aunt, where they witnessed a strict Baptist family with polished brass fixtures and women mending their knees. "In the past 50 years, this is a world where moral values ​​and furniture have not changed much," Anne Seba wrote in her 1990 biography of Ashley, which undoubtedly contributed to the young girl’s Idealization in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From time to time, Laura is also sent to stay with her aunt Elsie Mountney. She has no children of her own, loves her niece, gives her books, and buys her free clothes. Aunt Elsie’s middle-class life is a kind of "exquisite, noble and elegant" life, Saiba writes-this is the quality of young Laura who will one day engage in the touting business.

At the beginning of World War II, she evacuated to Wales with her mother and siblings, but the local secondary school was full, and 14-year-old Laura was sent to the Secretarial Academy. At the age of 18, she joined the British Royal Women's Navy, commonly known as the "wren". For a while, she was operating a teleprinter in a British country mansion where she planned to land in Normandy. The uniform ("very good quality navy gabardine, you can press it down and wear it with a clean white cotton shirt and collar and tie," she told a British newspaper) shaped her lifelong belief in quality fabrics. Laura Ashley's clothing is made of natural textiles, usually cotton, such as calico and corduroy, as well as wool, silk, velvet or lace.

In 1949, she married Bernard Ashley, a rebellious and charismatic businessman who had a knack for all mechanical things. Once the company was established, she was responsible for financial and operational matters. In 1955, the young family moved to Surrey and in 1957 moved their factory to a 1,200 square foot carriage house in rural Kent. Four years later, they experienced a devastating flood that almost destroyed their fledgling business, and they moved again to Laura's hometown of Wales. There, in a small town called Machynlleth, they opened their first retail store. This is a grocery store that sells honey, walking sticks and Welsh flannel garments in addition to products still known as Ashley Mountney. commodity. This rather bohemian family once settled in two tents by the river mouth and lived in this store for a few years before it really took root in Kano, which became the long-term headquarters of their empire. Four people are here to continue working with the couple's children. "Every time I eat, I discuss business," said Jane Ashley, the eldest. As a company photographer, she took unretouched soft-focus images of rural family life, capturing "calm, beautiful, and naive fantasy", as Batsheva designer Batsheva Hay said, projected by the brand.

Ashley has not received formal design training. She first set foot in the dress field in 1959, when she began to produce gardening work clothes. "She didn't go in and say,'Let's create a fashion collection.' It really is,'What do I use in my life?'" said Penne Cairoli, who has been president of Laura Ashley in the Americas for nearly ten years. Work clothes, knee-length and sleeveless, are made of cotton diamonds — a heavyweight fabric similar to denim — usually with striped prints; young women wear them as fashionable dresses. However, by the late 1960s, the couple created longer, more elegant silhouettes. The new length is Bernard’s suggestion: They are essentially textile printers, so why not sell more cloth? These dresses are decorated with high collars, long skirts, sheep sleeves, lace and ruffles, and are paired with exquisite pin-button cotton shirts, lace-trimmed pajamas and grosgrain ribbon hats, consolidating the "Laura Ashley" (Laura Ashley). Ashley) modeling".

All of this came, as if she had planned it this way, in time to become the perfect antidote for the paradigm shift and synthetic fabrics in the 1960s, because many young hippies rejected the complexities of urbanization and looked for a simpler and more self-sufficient life. Martin Wood, the author of a book about Ashley's coffee table, wrote that the designer "confirmed that the most important thing about any brand is the emotion behind it" and the main feeling that she evokes by "wearing in simple clothes". Home," as she describes it, is nostalgia. However, despite the implicit conservatism, Laura Ashley's dresses are modern, even feminist: practical, easy Washing, no structure on the waist-the kind of "rational" or "aesthetic" dress designer, writer, artist and socialist in 19th century textiles William Morris is another well-known pattern supplier. He proposed that as a response to corsets and corsets, they were not much different from the loose, floor-length robes worn by feminists.

Ironically, this business is booming in the city: in 1968, the first store selling only Laura Ashley products was opened in London, at 23 Pelham Street in South Kensington, and the second Another store was opened on Fulham Road in 2009. In the heyday of the brand, the Fulham Road store, known for its green marble facade, sold 4,000 dresses in a week. Princess Diana has always been the most famous unofficial ambassador of the brand: standing next to David Bowie at the Live Aid concert, wearing a mint green low-rise suit with a polka dot belt; as a young unmarried in a transparent skirt Kindergarten teacher, one child is on her hip and the other is standing next to her. One of the reasons for the brand’s popularity—perhaps why People’s Princess likes it—is that the clothes are well-made, durable, and affordable. The green and white labels in each piece bear the words "Made in Britain", giving this solid and special feeling.

In the 1980s, the company expanded to the household items of my youth: bedspreads, upholstered furniture, curtains, wallpaper, and small flowers on tiles, perfectly arranged together to create a matching shelter. Ashley obviously prefers a sweet, simple atmosphere-"Handmade patchwork, needlework, rag rugs, lots of lace and white thread (along with an old iron) are all happy to me," she said in "Labor Read in the introduction. Ashley's Home Decor Book" (1982). But perhaps, in addition to drawing inspiration from Welsh and English cottages, she also thought of French country castles, because when this book was published, she and Bernard had already moved I went to France and bought one.

Three years later, tragedy happened. On September 8, 1985, Ashley fell down the stairs at her daughter Jane’s home in the Cotswolds, where she had celebrated her 60th birthday the day before. She was in a coma and died nine days later, only two and a half months after the company's first stock offering. At that time, Laura Ashley Co., Ltd. was in its heyday, but Ashley himself was the soul of the company and soon began to establish it. By 1990, Laura Ashley was at a loss, and by 2003, it closed all stores in the United States and Canada, focusing on licensing and e-commerce. There are some attempts to revive it before the pandemic: a capsule series launched in collaboration with Rag & Bone, featuring baseball caps and men's hoodies with pink flower sprigs; another item in collaboration with Urban Outfitters , Such as an imperial waist mini skirt with a pink cotton print and a quilted babydoll dress decorated with swans, it feels like Victoriana has passed the Riot Grrrl filter. But the brand, like many other brands, has been struggling for the past few years and entered the bankruptcy process (the British term for bankruptcy) in March 2020 (therefore, the remaining 153 Laura Ashley stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland have been Closed), before being acquired by investment company Gordon Brothers next month, Gordon Brothers plans to "rekindle Mrs. Ashley's original vision," as Ramez Toubassy, ​​the former brand president of Gordon Brothers, said at the time of the acquisition.

15 collaborations between Laura Ashley and Batsheva were released this week. Their dresses and shirts of the same name are undoubtedly a tribute to Ashley’s original vision (Laura Ashley’s son Nick once wrote to Hai Yi, thank her for inheriting his mother’s legacy), but with more modern silhouettes and textiles, à la goldlamé, red flocked taffeta or navy tartan. In this series, Hay used Laura Ashley's archive floral prints and line drawings to create a series of cheerful and flowing dresses, skirts and blouses. Their layered patterns, neon lights and chic tailoring make them both retro and stylish at low prices. For her regular series. "I tried to make it as reasonable as possible," Hay said, "because this is where I admire Laura Ashley."

In this way, and due to the large number of wearers, the brand always has a populist color. At the same time, of course, English country idylls are traditionally a lifestyle reserved for certain people, namely whites and Protestants. Designers like Hay borrowed from her Jewish tradition-her product line was inspired in part by the "vulgar New York aesthetic" of her Yiddish-speaking grandmother, as she puts it-as well as Kika Vargas, Yuhan Wang and Sindiso Khumalo, both women of color have found ways to subvert aesthetics and traditions, and in the process make them their own styles.

Khumalo lives in South Africa and references her Zulu traditions in her works using bright, sustainable fabrics. She admires Ashley’s ability to “tell stories with her textiles”. Now, Khumalo has been studying portraits of black women in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including freed African American women who had been enslaved and black women in Europe, and pointed out that although their lives may be similar to what Khumalo said, their whites Colleagues—the women Laura Ashley refers to—in terms of their clothing, "big, big, big shoulders and many embroidered details," Kumalo said, usually very similar: "People wear an aesthetic, And it goes beyond specific ethnic groups—this is the clothes worn by society at the time," she said. For her, fashion can dig out stories and details lost in history. It is "a tool for radicalism and a tool for talking about the experience of black Africans." Ms. Wang, who lives in London, is famous for her pleated flower pillars. She was trained in traditional Chinese painting when she was a child. She said that she spent several hours “outlining historical sites” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Like Khumalo, she also believes that looking back at the past can be a way to move forward: "My futurism is based on our past," she told me. "There is always something worth reflecting on. This is the source of the future."

These womenswear designs remind people that everyone should have beautiful and comfortable items, and these unstable and uncertain times may make many of us some of the pioneers. The pandemic has caused a wave of urban residents to travel to less populated areas and other isolated areas at home, until LARP has become the leading female in the urban kitchen, baking biscuits, fiddling with sour appetizers and canning their own food. Some people are tired of technology and its ensuing interference, and are returning to this land, or at least a piece of land, looking for alternatives to our technological dystopia. Then, we also entered a period of inflation, high oil prices, and supply chain disruptions; many people said it felt like the 70s—the heyday of Laura Ashley's dresses and a decade of dark, anxious The background color-it's back again. Now who doesn't want to be wrapped in a flower quilt, lying on the sofa and watching the "little house on the prairie"? It may be the feeling that the world is currently in danger, which ultimately promotes the popularity of prairie modeling: you can wear one of these practical and beautiful dresses in the fantasy of escaping reality, but also in your real life: Go to dinner, go to a protest, sit on the floor and play with a toddler. They are also timeless, because they are unlikely to be obsolete next season-after all, they have been more or less popular since the mid-1800s.