LAURA ASHLEY RETROSPECTIVE: BATH FASHION MUSEUM

Below is what the Fashion Museum says about the exhibition:

To celebrate the 60^th 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 1^st 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 focuses 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.

Here are some images from the exhibition: