When was laura ashley founded

Brian Jones was a year-old shop worker and keen painter when he first met Laura in , the year in which the company opened its first international shop, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Brian, now 67, remembers how his father, unbeknown to him, applied for a job as a designer at the company's offices in Carno on his behalf. What's a portfolio? I just went and took some pictures off the wall. Despite his inexperience, or perhaps because of it, he got the job. Why did she pick a little young lad from Newtown who was working in a shop with no design experience? She knew what she wanted. It was all from her. It was her ideas, her company. The s were halcyon days for Laura Ashley as the world became hooked on the label's romantic silhouettes, nostalgic frills and floral prints.

In one week alone, London's Fulham Road shop sold 4, dresses. Towards the end of the decade the company launched its first home furnishing range. By , the Ashleys had shops all over the world. New factories in Newtown, Powys and Gresford near Wrexham followed, creating hundreds of jobs for Welsh workers. As the business grew, so did the family's fortunes.

They had homes in London, Belgium, France and the Bahamas as well as a private plane and a sumptuous yacht. But Laura always kept her feet on the ground. Brian Jones agrees: "I think we all loved her. She was just Mrs Ashley. She was so ordinary and yet she was special. Sometimes she'd have a hole in her sleeve, it didn't matter. We were happy in our work," said Rosina Corfield. If there was something wrong with the family, the family came first.

When Rosina was raising her children, fabric would be delivered to her house so she would sew while caring for her family. My mother's politics stemmed from her attitude as a manager of a business and that the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. So the weakest link is the person you have to take care of the most. At 21, David left for the United States to open up new Laura Ashley shops, a move he believes was orchestrated by his mother to diffuse the difficult relationship he was having with his father at the time.

He eventually led the company's expansion programme and took great pride placing a placard in new shop windows that read: 'London, Paris, Llanidloes'. It was at a TV studio in America that his mother showed her "quite formidable" streak. David remembers a journalist starting a question with, "Well Laura, seeing as you are such a strong feminist…". You are a feminist, aren't you?

She looked at the woman and said, 'The trouble with feminists is that they put themselves on an equal with men. Well I'm a woman and I'm much stronger than any man. She would say, 'She's carrying on like a man in Parliament, shouting and screaming and ranting. A women should never shout like that. A women should never have to resort to sounding like a man'. David was in America when he learnt of his mother's accident, in an early morning phone call from his aunt.

But he did not realise the gravity of the situation until his father called him half-an-hour later. It's serious. Laura had fallen down the stairs in her daughter Jane's Cotswolds home. It was just ten days after her 60th birthday. When he saw his mother in a coma, David knew he had lost her. She was being kept alive on a machine which was very cruel. We had 10 days of my mother being in a coma and the English press were absolutely horrifically awful.

To this day when I think of certain newspapers, all I can think of is absolute anger at how they treated the family. David lost not just his mother but his business mentor: "I was a year-old man in the prime of my profession in America.

I really needed my mother. There was a lot of emotion and love attached to me doing this job with her. So losing her like that was quite a shock. Brian Jones recalls the news of her fall reaching the office: "We couldn't believe it. We were all in shock. In his brief written history of the business, Bernard Ashley recalled that it was in those rural settings that the first of the now-famous Laura Ashley design patterns began to emerge.

From place mats and scarfs, Mrs. Ashley branched out, first to other table linens and aprons, then to dresses and eventually to household articles, including curtains, sheets, wallpaper and even paints.

Since the mids, the Laura Ashley family business has known only growth, expanding sales in Europe, Canada, the United States, Singapore and, more recently, Japan. Group plans published late last year called for 15 additional retail stores in the United States in In recent years, Mrs. Ashley turned over much of the detailed design work to members of a team she put together. Exact details of Mrs.

All Sections. About Us. She was buried in Wales, where she was educated and grew up and where she established her world famous business of designing, manufacturing, and merchandising women's clothes and household items.

Her name had in her lifetime become synonymous with small, repetitive overall patterns; the use of natural fabrics; and a graceful simplicity in women's styles. Her dresses and blouses were noted for their Victorian-like high necks and full sleeves, the severity relieved by lace and ruffles.

Particularly characteristic was her soft, floppy, wool felt hat with a broad flexible brim that could be worn down over the eyes and ears or pushed back so as to reveal the forehead. It became common to speak of a "Laura Ashley look," a term applied to her garments, fabrics, and interior designs and even to the appearance of the young, expressionless, fresh-faced women who modeled her clothes. She married Bernard Ashley in On a kitchen table in their flat in the Pimlico section of London they designed placemats, scarves, tablecloths, aprons, and dresses by the silkscreen method.

They soon moved to a country home in Surrey and in the late s to Carno, Wales, now the headquarters of the firm's international operations. She concentrated on creating the designs and her husband on printing and merchandising them. Her life in the Welsh and English countryside, amidst farms and villages, clearly influenced the combination of Puritan function and Victorian nostalgia of her designs.

What you make as a designer is an expression of yourself. I love music and painting and I prefer life in the country. She said about it: "The uniform was a very good quality navy gabardine and you could press it and wear it with a clean white cotton shirt and collar and tie.