LAURA ASHLEY: The Romantic
Heroine
13 July - 26 August 2013
The Ball Room
To celebrate the 60th anniversary
in 2013 of the founding of the Laura Ashley label, the Fashion
Museum celebrates the vision of the romantic heroine that Laura
Ashley gave to fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. A look that fashion
editor Felicity Green, referred to in the Daily Mirror on
January 1st 1970 as ‘soft-core femininity’ and
‘Victorian type demureness’. A look that prompted a generation of
young women to dress up as Thomas Hardy’s milkmaid from Tess of
the d’Urbevilles, or Cathy from Wuthering Heights
searching in vain across the northern moors for Heathcliff.
The exhibition will focus on the dresses that
caught the imagination and chimed with the zeitgeist. By the tail
end of the Swinging Sixties the bright and shiny bubble of optimism
had burst and so designers found inspiration, and comfort, in
nostalgia for times gone by. There was an appetite for escapism and
a move back to nature. TV and film hits included Upstairs
Downstairs, The Good Life and Far From the Madding
Crowd while fashion fans shopped at Antiquarius on the Kings
Road and collected Art Nouveau and Aubrey Beardsley prints.
Laura Ashley gave the world the chaste cotton
print maxi-dress in earth-hewn natural colours and a notion of life
in a golden age; a pastoral idyll far away from the mad city
life.