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Laura Ashley: the woman who changed the way we thought about houses and clothes in the 1970’s
Date: Thursday, 23rd February 2012 at 8pm
Lecturer: Anne Sebba
Location: DESY Hörsaal
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"Laura Ashley" - the name that has become an international byword for the classic English countrywoman living in bliss. But what was Laura Ashley the woman really like, behind the facade of the family-based company that not only used her name, but also was moulded on her personal image?
Anne Sebba was given access to the "Laura Ashley" company papers and talked uninhibitedly to many of the Ashley family in order to write the first biography of this remarkable woman who became one of the leading influences on British design and marketing last century.
Laura and Bernard Ashley started printing textiles in 1953. They used a domestic oven and a kitchen table. Their drive and ambition were astonishing. Their venture was to result in a fashion and home decoration business that is now renowned internationally. It led to fame and glamour, a chateau in France, a private plane and other attributes of fabulous wealth. It also developed into a fascinating business partnership between man and wife.
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In this lecture Anne describes Laura the astute businesswoman with her sure instinct for forecasting trends, her canny feel for colour and fabric and her often brilliant but perfectly simple ideas. She describes Laura the wife and mother: her relationship with Bernard, her sadness at leaving Wales that had been her inspiration for life on the Continent, her conviction that her place was with her husband. She describes her whims, her phobias and her habits.
Laura had a puritanical streak which brought a missionary zeal to her work. It was more than just a preference to prim high necklines and long all-concealing skirts. It was a belief that her company had a greater purpose than just making money. She always fought, on principal, to retain her ties with the rural community in Wales, fearing that mass production would destroy the ethnic and cottage industry on which the business was based. Above all, Laura wanted to create "a kind of scrubbed simple beauty." Even to some of her closest friends, Laura Ashley was "LA" by day, Laura by night. Laura Ashley was a remarkably determined and self contained woman seeking an alternative to feminist stridency in her merging of career and family.
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Anne Sebba is a biographer, lecturer and former Reuters foreign correspondent. She has written eight books, mostly about women, including Mother Teresa, Jennie Churchill (Winston's American Mother), Laura Ashley and Enid Bagnold, (author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden) and a history of women reporters called Battling For News.
She is currently researching a life of Wallis Simpson for a book and a film. For Radio 3 she wrote and presented The Daffodil Maiden about the pianist Harriet Cohen and is working on a documentary for Radio 4 about the pianist Joyce Hatto.
She has been a consultant on films about her books and gives talks regularly on cruises and across America, mostly about her books or her experiences as a journalist.
She has chaired several conferences about the future of biographies in a digital age, sits on the Committee of the Society of Authors, has worked for many years for the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN and has a particular interested in music and the arts, freedom of expression and the ethics of biography.
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Printable Version
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