Born in Wales in 1925, Laura Mountney was raised in London by a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, who, to the great shame of her elder daughter, was not particularly skilled in the domestic arts. In fashion, the brand’s influence is visible in the nouveau prairie look (see also: prairie girl, frontierswoman, Amish chic, cottage-core, trad) popularized by lines like Batsheva, Horror Vacui, Dôen and LoveShackFancy in the daintier, fairy tale-style dresses by Simone Rocha and in the arresting creations of a wave of rising designers, including Kika Vargas, Yuhan Wang and Sindiso Khumalo, who, with their luxe fabrics and avant-garde designs, are putting their own stylish, sophisticated twist on the aesthetic.Īnd yet, despite the brand’s enduring influence, few seem to know that Laura Ashley - like Liz Claiborne, Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan, among other eponymous designers of their own lines - was a real woman, not just a mellifluous name. “We just developed in our own way.” Indeed, the name “Laura Ashley” has long been shorthand for anything romantic and evocative of the countryside, examples of which, in recent years, have abounded anew.
“Living quite remotely as I have done, I have not been caught up with city influences,” she once told an interviewer. While other designers were relentlessly focused on the cosmopolitan and the new, Laura Ashley was looking to the Victorian past, with its sense of propriety and correspondingly modest silhouettes, and to its designer’s ultimately rather pastoral life.
The soon-to-be Princess of Wales, in a Laura Ashley skirt, 1980. Eventually, though, Bernard felt that an unambiguously feminine-sounding moniker would better suit their products, and they rechristened the company Laura Ashley. Not long after, in March 1954, the couple, Laura and Bernard Ashley, officially founded Ashley Mountney Ltd. Next, they made tea towels, napkins and place mats with simple geometric patterns. Orders from high street shops soon flooded in. The following year, while awaiting the birth of their first child, they printed scarves, largely because they had just returned from a trip to Italy, where young girls were emulating Audrey Hepburn’s character in “ Roman Holiday” (1953) and knotting them around their necks. The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, dyes and linen and, after poring over a handful of instructional library books, began silk-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores, and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. In 1952, a 28-year-old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
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