Laura Ashley

It's worth sitting with how different Laura Ashley's whole project was from most of what else was happening in British fashion this decade - while London's King's Road was heading toward safety pins and bondage straps by the late 70s, Ashley was building a genuinely enormous business on high-necked cotton dresses printed with small florals, sold as a kind of quiet, romantic counter-argument to almost everything modern fashion was doing at the time.

She and her husband Bernard had actually started the company back in 1953, printing headscarves and small home-furnishing textiles from their own kitchen table in Wales - real cottage industry, not a metaphor for it. What the 1970s did was scale that same aesthetic into full clothing lines and turn it into an international retail phenomenon, with shops opening across Britain and expanding into continental Europe and the US through the decade. The look drew consciously on Victorian and Edwardian dress - high collars, puffed sleeves, dropped or natural waists, floor-length or midi hemlines - filtered through soft, small-scale floral prints on plain cotton, which is exactly the register that made her such a natural anchor for the bohemian/prairie silhouette: romantic and modest rather than body-conscious, and reliant on the same kind of loose, smocked, high-necked construction that shows up in the peasant blouse.

I think the reason she matters as a design figure, and not just a retail success story, is that her prairie-cottage aesthetic connects to the decade's back-to-nature movement in a more sincere and sustained way than most fashion did - natural fiber, pastoral print references, an explicit nostalgia for a simpler, pre-industrial domestic ideal, at a moment when a real environmental and back-to-the-land consciousness was genuinely spreading through Western culture, not just fashion magazines borrowing its imagery for a season. By the end of the decade her clothes were everywhere, and I think that's the underrated point: an aesthetic this quietly countercultural in its values still became one of the biggest commercial fashion stories of the 1970s, running on an almost entirely different logic than Studio 54 glamour or King's Road punk and doing just as well for itself.