Eventually, though, Bernard felt that an unambiguously feminine-sounding moniker would better suit their products, and they rechristened the company Laura Ashley. While the decline of the brand is no doubt in part due to the aggressive competition it faced from high street chains like H&M, Topshop and IKEA, and online players like ASOS and Made.com, its also partly due to the fact that Laura Ashleys clothing, by the end, was just not Laura Ashley enough. The 26-piece collection saw Laura Ashleys vintage prints daubed onto super millennial items like cycling shorts, scrunchies and uber-short mini dresses. Laura Ashleys popularity reached a zenith in the 80s when its billowing prairie dresses and pie-crust collars came to define the Sloane Ranger look of the era. Poppy Marshall-Lawton, the head of brand and partnerships at Laura Ashley, said the companys late founder, Laura Ashley, was always inspired by the past but excited about the future, so getting the chance to reinvigorate the brand is a perfect new chapter in our already fabulous story., Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Laura Ashley, the fashion brand rescued from administration in March 2020, has signed a partnership with IMG to relaunch its womenswear range. Don't worry if you're on holiday in a villa of your own, there are legal ways to watch the finale live and on catch-up from outside the UK. craft project was a booming family business with global reach, one that employed 4,000 people in more than 220 stores worldwide and grossed roughly $130 million a year in revenue. Laura Ashley and Urban Outfitters create the dream puff sleeve dress. By 1979 it had 1,000 employees worldwide and a turnover of 25 million. In 1952, a 28-year-old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Perhaps you (or you and your mother) wore a demure ditsy floral print dress to church on Easter Sunday, or you went to the mall and left with a cotton button-down with a Peter Pan collar, a style favored by the oft-imitated Princess Diana. Business Live reported in June that a management buy-out to acquire the brand out of administration led by the then chief executive Katharine Poulter failed. Here's everything you need to know. Aunt Elsies middle-class life was one of fastidiousness, good taste and gentility, Sebba writes the very qualities that the young Laura would one day be in the business of peddling. Tobias Nanda, president, brands at Gordon Brothers said: We are delighted to partner with IMG to continue to expand Laura Ashley following the success of its spring homeware collection and fall fashion collaboration last year, said. When the pandemic broke the consortium threw in the towel, placing Laura Ashley into administration and closing the stores permanently. Throughout the nineties and noughties, fashion took a back seat to homewares and then last year the brand made several attempts to resuscitate its fashion offering. For this collection, Hay used Laura Ashley archival floral prints and line drawings to create a series of cheerful, flouncy dresses, skirts and blouses that, with their layered patterns, neon flourishes and chic cuts, feel at once retro and current, and that are priced lower than her regular line. There were some pre-pandemic attempts to revive it: a capsule collection with Rag & Bone that featured baseball caps and mens hoodies printed with sprigs of pink flowers; another with Urban Outfitters that, with pieces like an empire-waist minidress in a pink toile print and a quilted baby-doll frock bedecked with swans, felt like Victoriana passed through a Riot Grrrl filter. 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In May 2019, the brand launched a somewhat surprising brand collaboration with grungy teenage high street retailer Urban Outfitters. Poppy Marshall-Lawton, head of brand and partnerships at Laura Ashley, said: "We are very pleased to be partnering with Next to take the Laura Ashley brand to the next level. ", The Laura Ashley Home brand is coming to Next in Spring 2021. But the brand, like so many others, has struggled during the last couple of years and went into administration (the British term for bankruptcy) in March 2020 (as a result, the 153 remaining Laura Ashley stores in the U.K. and Ireland were closed), before being acquired the following month by the investment firm Gordon Brothers, which has plans to reignite Mrs. Ashleys original vision, as Ramez Toubassy, the former president of brands for Gordon Brothers, said at the time of the acquisition. "Finding the right brand partner to relaunch Laura Ashley was incredibly important to us. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/t-magazine/laura-ashley-batsheva.html. In fashion, the brands 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, Den 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. By then, the business, which had 220 shops in 12 countries and had expanded into home furnishings, was on the brink of flotation on the stock market, where it was valued at 200m. The joint administrators sold the Laura Ashley branding rights, its archives and related intellectual property to US-based advisory and investment firm Gordon Brothers in a multi-million pound deal. In the summer the company's 147 stores had a final closing down sale. Designers like Hay, who draws on her Jewish heritage her line was inspired, in part, by her Yiddish-speaking grandmothers frumpy New York aesthetic, as she puts it and Kika Vargas, Yuhan Wang and Sindiso Khumalo, who are all women of color, have found ways of subverting the aesthetic and its conventions and, in doing so, making it their own. Find out more about that here. Thats where the future comes from.. Find out more about the history of the brand here. In addition, Laura Ashley will also keep operating its own website. For anyone who grew up in the 1970s or 80s Laura Ashley might have appeared to be the brand that time forgot. Next, they made tea towels, napkins and place mats with simple geometric patterns. The uniform (very good quality navy gabardine, and you could press it and wear it with a clean white cotton shirt and collar and tie, she told an English newspaper) shaped her lifelong belief in quality fabrics. At the start of World War II, she evacuated with her mother and siblings to Wales, but the local secondary schools were full, and Laura, age 14, was sent to secretarial college instead. By the mid-80s, what had started as a D.I.Y. 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. However this deal did not include the stores, manufacturing and logistics operations in the UK or Ireland. Something went wrong, please try again later. Recent years have seen a surge in demand for the whimsical, ditsy floral-printed prairie dresses with which Laura Ashley found fame. Our focus in working with IMG will be to select additional strategic partnerships and collaborations to help bring the brands distinct aesthetic to consumers globally while continuing to develop our current brand partnerships, Nanda added. The next chapter in the Gordon Brothers rebirth of the brand is a deal with US marketing group IMG to relaunch Laura Ashley fashion, home and lifestyle ranges in the UK and internationally, working alongside Next and other partners.. 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It may be this sense, that the world is currently perilous, thats ultimately driving the popularity of the prairie look: You can wear one of these pragmatic, pretty dresses in your escapist fantasies, but also in your actual life: to a dinner, to a protest, to sit on the floor and play with a toddler. All rights reserved. Laura Ashley was one of the first to market an ideal of the quintessential English countryside, a concept later echoed by brands like Emma Bridgewater, Boden and Cath Kidston. British firms homeware will be available via Nexts UK stores and website from spring 2021. Anyone can read what you share. Perhaps you had a Laura Ashley bedroom, as I did, my bedspread, sheets, dust ruffle and wallpaper all featuring the Bramble pattern, whose deep green ivy and royal blue strawberries are the backdrop to so many of my teenage memories. It wasnt until the late 1960s, however, that Laura Ashley really became a fashion label, when it launched a range of long-length Victoriana maxi dresses that were to become the brands signature. A 1980s-era Laura Ashley print advertisement. British fashion label Laura Ashley has become the latest business casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. She went into a coma and never regained consciousness, dying nine days later, a mere two and a half months before the companys first stock issuance. Police are carrying out forensic investigations, Love Island 2022 final live results as winners of ITV2 series announced. Three years later, tragedy struck. Read our, {{#verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}} {{^verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}}. Designers of home dcor, too, are embracing the English country look and offering a warm, cozy corrective to minimalism. And yet, despite the brands 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. Still more floral wallpaper can be found in the recent collaboration between the flower stylist Willow Crossley and Barneby Gates, the resulting hand-printed motifs reminiscent of early Laura Ashley textiles. 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Rather than mining its extensive archives of puff sleeves, high-neck and sailor collared floral dresses that feel amazingly of-the-moment (the fact that vintage 80s Laura Ashley dresses are selling on eBay for upwards of 200 a pop is testament to this), the collection instead melted into everything else on offer on the high street at the time. The brand is associated with pie crust collars of the style made famous, and fashionable, by the Princess of Wales; fashion moved on and the minimalist 90s had no place for flowery prints or fussy necklines. The look was so popular the flowing flowery frocks chimed well with the pervading hippie sensibility of the time that when the brand opened its second London store on the Fulham Road in the 1970 (the first opened in South Kensington in 1968), it sold 4000 of the dresses in the first week alone. And yet, for all their implied conservatism, Laura Ashley dresses were also modern, and one might even say feminist: practical, easy to wash, unstructured around the waist the sort of rational or aesthetic dresses the 19th-century textile designer, writer, artist and socialist William Morris, another famous purveyor of patterns, proposed as a response to boned corsets and bustles, and not so different from the loose floor-length gowns the suffragists wore. ': Inside the Lionesses' Euros party as Jill Scott pulls an all-nighter, I could only continue to breastfeed because of my privilege, Pharmacies in talks with Royal Mail to minimise impact of strikes, As a meta show about navel-gazing Hollywood, Irma Vep should not be this good.