Margaret Howell

Margaret Howell was founded in 1970 in London by Margaret Howell, an art-school-trained designer who had been producing menswear in small quantities from her flat in Blackheath. The first product was a single style of cotton shirt; her menswear shop opened on London's South Molton Street in 1980, and women's clothing was added shortly after. The thesis from the start was clear: utility-rooted British menswear (the shirt, the corduroy trouser, the duffle coat, the mac) made to the highest specification she could achieve. The Margaret Howell vocabulary has been astonishingly consistent: cotton poplin shirts with a particular gentle collar shape, fisherman knits, donkey jackets, deck shoes, plain-front trousers, and a colour palette that drifts only marginally from chalk, sand, ink, and ochre. Production has remained primarily British — the Edinburgh-made knitwear, the Northamptonshire-made shoes, the small Norfolk shirt makers — and the brand has consistently resisted the kind of expansion that would dilute the proposition. Margaret Howell operates flagships in London (Wigmore Street, Brewer Street), Tokyo (Aoyama, Kyobashi), and a small set of international partners. The brand is held by Howell and operated by long-time managing director Theodora Boyd. Howell, now in her seventies, remains designer-in-chief. Few brands in modern fashion have maintained such a quietly consistent and rigorous body of work — and few have made British understated taste into so completely export-ready a luxury proposition.