Fashion

Better with age: the enduring fashion philosophy of Margaret Howell


It’s half a century since Margaret Howell first ran her fingers over the cotton of the white shirt she is holding, but it still elicits a grin. “It’s that I was excited about,” she says, “Do you feel it? I wanted that softness, proper shirting and all the detail of buttons and buttonholes, but without any of the stiffness.” That feel was something she had first found in markets and jumble sales after she left art school in London in 1969. She initially used to refashion the old Jermyn Street shirts she rummaged for, and then, having sourced the precise weight of Egyptian cotton from David & John Anderson in Glasgow, started to make her own.

The shirt Howell is holding is in the basement archive of her shop on Margaret Street in London. It is “filed” on a rack with some of her other original pieces, all made nearly 50 years ago, and lovingly retained, along with drawings and adverts and photos and press clippings that chart the beginnings of her eponymous brand. From those beginnings Howell has established not only her landmark Wigmore Street store up the road, but a global presence that includes outlets in Paris and Florence and New York, more than 100 shops in Japan and revenues in excess of £100m a year.

Jane Birkin in Margaret Howell.



Jane Birkin in Margaret Howell. Photograph: Courtesy of Margaret Howell

Howell is a spirited 73, slim and nervily self-effacing, in dark jeans and a green wool sweater. When she talks about the clothes she has made and kept, you are also aware she is talking about her life. Associations bleed into each other. A beautiful unlined linen jacket on the archive rack, another first that has become a staple, brings back childhood images of “men on the seafront, on the south coast, with their Sunday jackets on”. And also memories of her grandfather, who had a barber shop in Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey, and a Victorian house where he grew peaches up the garden wall. And of visits to his sisters – Howell’s aunts – who lived in a Nissen hut on the South Downs, “built up on stilts, with a laundry underneath”, which Howell and her two sisters would visit on summer Sundays and then go swimming in the sea at Rottingdean.

Other fabrics in the archive bring other memories. There is the memory of the worn gabardine of a coat that her father – an army captain in the war – gardened in, and the smell of bonfire smoke that it carried when he came up to read her a bedtime story. A corduroy jacket that recalls the style of a geography teacher at her school, which prompted her to find the best corduroy from a maker near Hebden Bridge. And then the trademark tweeds, Harris and Irish, that bring to her mind “going out from primary school and out on to the common and sitting on tufts of dry grass in the summer. Something of that feel.”

All of these sensory elements were part of Howell’s original collections in the late 1970s and 1980s and they remain the cornerstones of her collections today. It is one thing to feel the associations of fabrics, it is another to bring them so consistently to life. “I don’t think I was consciously reacting to any of this,” she says, looking back on the five decades she is somewhat reluctantly (“it’s not really my thing”) celebrating. “I just had a sense of what I liked: clothes that were soft and casual and slightly oversized. I was always out of doors growing up and you needed clothes that you could move in easily.”

Margaret Howell in her studio in 1978.



Margaret Howell in her studio in 1978. Photograph: Courtesy of Margaret Howell

Howell was born immediately after the war, in 1946, a fact that seems crucial to her aesthetic. She is a dozen years younger than Mary Quant, for example, and felt a different sense of liberation to the hedonism of the 1960s. She made her own clothes in her teens, but, she insists, putting the side of her hand to her jeans, her hemlines were never shorter than just above the knee. She was drawn rather to the understatement of Jean Muir. To the trouser suits of Yves Saint Laurent. “I loved the way that Katharine Hepburn wore men’s trousers,” she says, “or what seemed to be men’s trousers.” At school she remembers looking long and hard at the brown pin-striped suit of another female teacher, “which was deeply unfashionable, but which I knew I might be able to do something with”.

Howell’s mother had worked in a dress shop in Reigate and had a style of her own. “She never went to the hairdresser’s like the other mums – my sister and I used to cut her hair – and she let it go grey.” They did not have much money, but at Christmas her mother would take her girls up to Selfridges, not only to look in the windows, but to buy them something that might last, like a Braemar wool cardigan. Or they would take trips up to Dickins & Jones to choose some cotton for a dress.

After art school, Howell started making papier-mache beads out of newspaper, selling bracelets and chokers to Browns boutique. She had a strange break when she got a call out of the blue to go to meet Elizabeth Taylor, who had seen a couple of her designs and was working on the film Zee & Co at Elstree. Howell ended up making a “sort of beaded top” for the actor, “an awful thing”, she says, that nevertheless gave her the encouragement to carry on.

Her older sister, Jean, was a maker, too: silk scarves and Fair Isle sweaters. Howell helped with the silk printing before she came across her jumble sale shirts. She had a sense that she was going against the grain of the high street. “Everything that was going out of fashion, I wanted it back in,” she says. “All the traditional elements but done with more looseness, a different feel.” She was always grateful that her mother had never fallen for nylon sheets like everyone else. In terms of the 60s, you might think of it as her hankering for the simplicity of The Long and Winding Road and Mull of Kintyre after the extravagances of Sgt Pepper and the Maharishi.

Designer Kenzō Takada wearing a Margaret Howell corduroy top.

Designer Kenzō Takada wearing a Margaret Howell corduroy top. Photograph: Courtesy of Margaret Howell

She has stayed true to her tactile inspirations. In her Wigmore Street shop, you have to resist running your fingers over everything. Her design studio is at the back of the store and she is here most days, except Wednesday, when she looks after her youngest, two-year-old granddaughter. She tries to focus on the clothes and leaves running the business to her managing director, Richard Craig. Two mornings a week, through the winter, she swims in the outdoor lido at Charlton, south-east London. She has a cottage near Woodbridge in Suffolk and she swims in the North Sea in the summer.

The Suffolk house is the last of a terrace of six designed by the Swiss architect Rudy Mock in 1965: “a very end-of-the-road place”, she says, “and the coast is very raw there, with the North Sea bashing in and eroding it like mad.” She used to come to this coast with her children when they were small. Since her son Edward died in 2011, aged 30, it seems to have become more important to her as a place of refuge. She loves the flatness and the skies; and the colours of marsh and lagoon and shingle inform the palette of her clothes.

The original label was a collaborative effort with Paul Renshaw, later her husband. They set up the first workshop in their one-bed flat in Blackheath. “We had the bed raised up near the ceiling so we could have the sewing machines underneath,” she says. The kitchen was the office. “It prompted us to get married because the machinists came early and it stopped us having to be embarrassed scrambling around.”

Margaret Howell’s studio in London.



Margaret Howell’s studio in London. Photograph: Gabby Laurent/The Observer

It was hard to sell her men’s shirts for women at first. She had some interest from Paul Smith, and sold some shirts through his Nottingham store, and from Tommy Perse, of the legendary Los Angeles store Maxfield. (It was this association that later led Jack Nicholson to buy one of Howell’s corduroy jackets, which he insisted on wearing in The Shining – Stanley Kubrick put in an order for 12 more). Joseph Ettedgui of the retailer Joseph was her most consistent champion in those years, however. “He said: ‘When you do a full men’s collection, I will open a shop for you.’”

When her South Molton Street shop did open in 1977, women came in wanting to look like Annie Hall, and her style found a unisex moment that it has never lost. She used to take her two children, as babies, into the new workshop as the business expanded, but her marriage and her partnership with Renshaw eventually failed, and they divorced in 1987. “He got too caught up in the glamour of it, I suppose you might say,” she says.

The business had outstretched itself, too, and she saved it by agreeing a partnership with a Japanese businessman, Sam Segure, who wanted to sell her label under licence in Japan. Segure has allowed Howell to keep full control of design, as that business has grown steadily over three decades – even though Howell eventually sold her majority stake to a publicly listed Japanese company.

Margaret Howell.



‘We were a family that always darned socks’: Margaret Howell. Photograph: Gabby Laurent/The Observer

The Japanese operation in particular has made Howell a wealthy woman, but her habits have not changed too much. She lives alone, in London and in Suffolk – she has “a friend” but “we could never live in the same house: he collects a lot of things”, she says with a shudder. Howell was sustainable decades before sustainability became a catwalk mantra. “We were a family that always darned socks,” she says. “As a rule I keep things I like until they wear out. I have had a cotton-linen towel, which is lovely after an open-air swim – and which they don’t really make any more. It is totally worn out, but I still use it. I don’t like having too many things.”

That less-is-more philosophy seems woven into her clothes as well as her life. She has three principal designers now, but she insists on going with them to look at fabrics, which is where the magic often happens. She is drawn to things that are made on old looms. “It makes it slightly more irregular and raw,” she says, though she was surprised recently to like a soft white plastic fabric in Japan. “It reminded me of those clear plastic macs we used to have as kids from Woolworths,” she says. “Slightly sticky; that lovely smell.”

Does she still need to have the last say on everything?

“Well it has my name on it, so yes. And I still want to try everything on myself. It is only then that I can feel it, and I can see the proportions more clearly. I still do that with everything we sell.”

Her abiding satisfaction comes not from newness, she insists, but from the things that have always sold, and still sell consistently: the corduroys and the linens and the shirts and the tweeds. “That is when you know that everything works about it,” she says. “And that there is nothing at all unnecessary.”

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