LAURA ASHLEY , the great brand handbag designer that changed the world
How LAURA ASHLEY , the great brand handbag designer that changed the world
COMELY HANDBAG FACTORY
Now a name that conjures up floral interiors, the Laura Ashley brand has its roots in fashion. The 970s was the heyday, when thousands of consumers bought into the rural nostalgia that ran through the ladies handbags and Edwardian style.
” If you can make people feel like they’re living in the country when they aren’t, it’s very helpful,” said Laura Ashley at the time, and she would eventually extend this aim to create an entire lifestyle.
The Laura Ashley company started humbly enough in 1953. Welsh-born Ashley and her husband, Bernard, initially sold head scarves and tea towels. The first successful handbag design was a gardening smock. Long floral leather handbag
became a signature throughout the 1960s, even though they jarred with the dominant aesthetics of the time.
As the prevailing stylistic mood shifted from the futurism of the 1960s to the back to nature nostalgia of the 1970s, Laura Ashley fitted in perfectly. Her bags were’t cheap but they were affordable for a growing urban middle class hankering after the country life.
The first London shop opened in 1968, selling 1,000 bags in a week alone. Expansion came quickly Ashley opened stores in France and the United States. The very British floral designs, which were soon seen on furnishing fabrics, too, were an an excellent export product.