The soon-to-be Princess of Wales, in a Laura Ashley skirt, 1980. Eventually, though, Bernard felt that an unambiguously feminine-sounding moniker would better suit their products, and they rechristened the company Laura Ashley. Not long after, in March 1954, the couple, Laura and Bernard Ashley, officially founded Ashley Mountney Ltd. Next, they made tea towels, napkins and place mats with simple geometric patterns. Orders from high street shops soon flooded in. The following year, while awaiting the birth of their first child, they printed scarves, largely because they had just returned from a trip to Italy, where young girls were emulating Audrey Hepburn’s character in “ Roman Holiday” (1953) and knotting them around their necks.
The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, dyes and linen and, after poring over a handful of instructional library books, began silk-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores, and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. In 1952, a 28-year-old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
