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'Gentle, gracious living': Laura Ashley and how the 'prairie homemaker' lifestyle took hold

Decades before today's homestead look,blaze neopreme Welsh fashion-and-homeware guru Laura Ashley was selling a rural, nostalgic idyll. Now, her romantic, rose-tinted vision of a "simpler life" – and the traditional values attached to it – is more popular than ever. But why?

There's no clearer sign that the prairie look is still gaining popularity than when incongruously sported by an icon of metropolitan life: New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City. In the final season of the show's divisive sequel, And Just Like That, which concluded in August, a trip to her boyfriend Aidan's farmhouse in rural Virginia has her running off to the local store to clothe herself in the lacy collars, puffed sleeves and long floral skirts more commonly seen on 19th Century settlers. Her transition from witty columnist to the writer of Victorian-era romantic fiction sees her throwing off her Manolo Blahniks and dressing like her characters.

And it's not just Carrie. Nostalgia for Victoriana, and the simple way of life it embodies, has seeped into social media via tradwife influencers such as Utah farmer Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm; and on to catwalks and high streets.

Several decades before this 19th Century homestead look spread across the internet, however, there was an earlier revival of nostalgic, romantic fashion, spearheaded by the British clothing and textile designer Laura Ashley, who was born 100 years ago on 7 September 1925. Widely considered an influential tastemaker, she was described as "creating an image of Englishness that women worldwide wanted to buy". Through the 1970s and early 80s her signature rose-tinted, bucolic style was a big mood in UK fashion and homeware.

"I don't think there's anything very special about our things," the Welsh designer told BBC Wales in 1977, batting back the suggestion that she was a "trendsetter". Instead, the designs simply gave women what they needed, and "evolved from necessity". The business had a quintessentially British beginning in 1952, with Ashley, a secretary for the Women's Institute, visiting the organisation's display of traditional handicrafts at the V&A. Inspired by the patchwork textiles, she resolved to make something similar. However, the Victorian fabrics she had admired at the museum, featuring small flowers and delicate stripes, no longer existed: she would have to print her own.

The result – made possible by a rudimentary printing screen fashioned by her husband Bernard – who also co-managed the business – pleased her, and, noting a gap in the market for items that were both pretty and practical, she began making scarves, tea towels, and later, aprons. Bernard had bigger ideas, envisaging reams of upholstery fabric sold wholesale, and so it was Laura's name that went on the label, and stayed there as the orders flooded in.

In 1968, customers queued at the door of the first Laura Ashley shop in South Kensington. By Laura's death in 1985, the company had 220 shops in 12 countries, only fading out when looks such as 80s power dressing and 90s minimalism took over, reflecting women's changing role in society.

The timing of Laura Ashley's Victorian-inspired venture was perfect, bolstered by a post-war boom in production, and offering a wholesome, high-necked alternative (always in natural fibres) to the bold hot pants and revealing miniskirts of the hedonistic Swinging Sixties scene. Feminism might have been in ascendence, but not everybody welcomed this shifting society. Ashley was offering a retrograde alternative, just as the tradwife trend does today. "I knew in my heart that was not what most people wanted," she said. "I sensed that most people wanted to raise families, have gardens and live life as nicely as they can."

Laura Ashley's aesthetic, and the values it espoused, were romantic throwbacks to what she felt was a simpler time. As Anne Sebba notes in her 1990 biography Laura Ashley: A Life by Design: "To her mind, the Victorian era symbolised gentle, gracious living, a time when standards, domestic and industrial, were at their highest and England at its best." Her clothing was intended for women in a traditional domestic setting, that was both comfortable and charming. It was "brilliant marketing," Sebba tells the BBC.

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Laura struggled to reconcile the demands of the business with her belief that a mother shouldn't work when the children were around, sometimes packing the children off to bed at 4:30pm to make this possible. She would also decline her OBE – deeming it a slight on Bernard, particularly as the letter addressed her as "Ms", which, for someone who valued the sanctity of marriage above all, felt beyond the pale.

For a while, in the 70s and early 80s, Victoriana seemed unstoppable. The more fashion-conscious hippies seeking a more billowing, bohemian silhouette jumped on the trend, and children's characters such as Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Shortcake, dressed in patchwork pinafores and bloomers, flooded the US and European markets with merchandise, from dolls and stationery to bed linen and curtains.

Meanwhile, the US series Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983) became one of television's most popular shows. Melissa Gilbert was just a child when she played Laura Ingalls with her strawberry-blonde plaits, but 50 years on, her lifestyle brand Modern Prairie, founded in 2022, answers a demand for cottagecore dresses, smock aprons and textiles reminiscent of the era. And there is a Netflix reboot of Little House on the Prairie currently in the making.

The simple Victorian prints that Laura Ashley had seen in the V&A worked brilliantly in monochrome, which, coupled with imported cotton, kept costs low, enabling customers to style themselves and their homes on a budget. "They somehow clocked the aspirational desires of a whole generation," says Sebba. "And by producing these clothes that seemed to come from the countryside and were very cheap, and the household fabrics to go with it, they enabled a whole generation to ignore social class, and that was powerful."

That their fabrics should be described as "an image of Englishness", however, overlooks the company's connection with Wales, where Laura was born. In 1960, now parents of three ? and later, four ? children, the couple relocated to a 500-acre farm in the Welsh Valleys, bringing the company with them, and providing welcome employment. A champion sheep shearer became their master garment cutter, and even when their products were stocked by Harrods and Liberty's, "made in Wales" was printed on the labels, and the fabric dyed in the earthy browns, greens and grey-blues that recalled the landscape she loved.

This connection with the British countryside was part of the packaging of the look. "It was the first company to offer this whole lifestyle," explains Sebba. "It wasn't simply that you were buying a dress or decorating your walls, or making curtains, you were buying into this whole notion that the rural life was preferable to urban life."

Fifty years on, Carrie Bradshaw's milkmaid look enacts this fantasy of a country life, as well as her desire for domestic stability, described by Laura Ashley as "security at home", and central, she said, to her clothing's appeal. "A rose-tinted idea of the past… is especially prevalent in times of systemic upheaval and uncertainty," Dr Gaby Harris, a sociologist and lecturer in fashion cultures at?Manchester Metropolitan University, tells the BBC.

"In the 1970s, we saw the major political shift, combined with drastic changes in industrial systems and global governance, and the beginning of the mounting return to wealth inequality, which we are bearing witness to today," she says. "It is no surprise that this is met with a dream of returning to a 'simpler time' or even a simpler way of life" ? even if such ideas, she cautions, "counter progress towards equal rights and opportunities".

For others, it's just a bit of harmless dressing up. "It was such fun to wear Laura Ashley clothes," reminisces Sebba. "I'm old enough to remember buying these extraordinary frilly shirts with lace insets. You felt you had entered another era, that somehow the trials and tribulations of the office could be forgotten if you wore petticoats and frills and aprons and cameo brooches."

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