Designer Laura Ashley

The apparel and furnishing designer, Laura Ashley, began her career in fashion and interior decorating by selling tea towels. Ashley first started silk-screening linen dish towels with her husband, Bernard Ashley, on their kitchen table in 1953. Mrs. Ashley was experiencing a difficult first pregnancy and wanted to pass the time until her child's birth by making patchwork home furnishings. Ashley was frustrated by the scarcity of small prints in London at the time, so she decided to make her own. Husband Bernard, a natural entrepreneur, thought that if they used his wife's silk-screened designs on tea towels, which could easily be cut and sewn into a marketable product. The couple read books about how to cut fabric and make patterns, and by the 1960s, Laura Ashley had branched out into designing nightgowns and aprons. Ashley's original designs were inspired by Victorian prints and romantic ideas (Murphy 150).

Ashley formed Laura Ashley, Inc., and 40 years later her lines of home furnishing products and clothing were being sold in 475 retail outlets spread ou

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open for ways that she could expand her artistic talents. One day, after she saw a line of people outside her factory in Wales waiting to gather the dress-fabric remnants which her workers tossed out, she learned that the crowd wanted the fabric for sofa slip-covers. Laura Ashley was soon putting her Victorian designs on everything from wall coverings to furniture. The company then became one of the first to sell coordinating fabric products as home furnishings. Laura Ashley created the same gentle floral prints that she had used for her apparel line for her finely pleated lampshades and her rounded upholstery pieces. She also worked on a series of books, like "The Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating," which explained the secrets of the her personal style and showed consumers how to do things like dress a window or decorate a bathroom on a budget with her products (Dickson 8-122). Also, years before Donna Karan was designing stockings, Ashley had become internationally known for decorating Welsh Victorian homes and 18th century French chateaus, as well as her own family's Welsh hill farm and Regency London house. Her faded, mellow style appeared throughout homes in Europe, where she used hand-made patchwork quilts, needle
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