The Hare and the Tortoise and Margaret Howell Freya Martin The near fifty year long career of a woman you might not know much about. Margaret Howell is sitting at your kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon reading the papers and wasting the day away. She is the hot pot of coffee that you smell before you taste. She is swimming not long after the sun has risen in the nearest lido before the rest of the world has woken up. She is the brown paper bag of fresh vegetables and the absence of a fridge freezer. She is the designer whose quiet name has endured the test of time and politely refuses to go anywhere else. Growing up in post-wartime Britain in Tadworth, Surrey; Howell’s mother would make all of her clothes bar the secondhand Burberry trench coats and Cacharel shirts she would save up earnestly for weeks to buy. From a young age she was instilled with the philosophy that if you were to have the most comfortable clothes of the highest quality you were to make them yourself.
Margaret Howell photographed in her kitchen at home in Blackheath by Robert Barber for the Sunday Times Magazine, 27/11/94.
The lower bodies of two models are pictured, one in light rolled up chino trousers and slingback black leather crossover sandals, the other in rolled up faded denim jeans and black loafers. Photographed by Koto Bolofo to feature in the look book for Margaret Howell’s S/S14 collection.
“From a young age she was instilled with the philosophy that if you were to have the most comfortable clothes of the highest quality you were to make them yourself.”
Described as “very nearly very good” by a panel of tutors, she was accepted into Goldsmiths College in London to study fine art in the late sixties, where she no doubt adopted the uniform of practical t-shirts, jeans and shirts that she still wears habitually today. In a 2002 interview with The Independent, Howell remarked, “When I left college there seemed to be two options: become an artist or a teacher. I didn’t want to do either.” And so she didn’t, instead falling into fashion. Initially she began by knitting berets and gloves and beading jewellery which she would sell to Browns in London’s South Molton Street. Yet after finding a pinstriped shirt in a 1970 jumble sale she decided to remake it in a casual laid-back style that would appeal to younger people as opposed to ageing businessmen. This came at a time when women were expected to wear blouses, while shirts were tailored almost exclusively for men. Howell spotted a very irrational gap in the market and saw herself filling it. By 1975, she established a workroom with then husband, Paul Renshaw, an interior designer, where these high quality shirts were to made and later picked up by the likes of Paul Smith and Ralph Lauren before Joseph Ettedgui, of Joseph, went on to stock her products in the basement of his London store. Her arrival onto the fashion scene coincided with Woody Allen’s 1977 cult classic Annie Hall, which sees a gamine Diane Keaton fashioned in oversized brown trouser suits and wide ties, rigid collared white shirts and bowler hats. Keaton’s leading lady was a tom boy dream girl for thousands of women and Margaret Howell’s androgynous designs offered the opportunity to become her. Having expanded her line of design from shirts alone, in 1980, actor Jack Nicholson (an admirer of her work) insisted upon wearing a Margaret Howell corduroy jacket, deep burgundy in colour, throughout the duration of Stanley Kubrick’s psychological thriller, The Shining. The film, adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name, is one Howell admits a certain distaste for, although Nicholson’s commission for thirteen identical jackets more than flattered her.
Later that year, Howell and Renshaw set up their first independent shop in St Christopher’s Place, tucked behind Oxford Street and laid out with a Persian rug and dark wooden dressers, building her reputation as a reliable British designer to huge success. Such success drove the pair to relocate to a store on Bruton Street just off of Bond Street, a location which didn’t suit the people she designed for and occupied a mood which struggled to live up to those of previous shops, and in turn led to the failure of both her marriage and business. Howell disappeared from work for 18 months, much to the disappointment of her slowly growing base of loyal customers, after refusing to compromise with Renshaw on the quality she had cemented her name with. She returned with a second wind for a surprise collection for Spring/Summer1998, having first shown at London Fashion Week in 1995, and was instantly back in her stride. It is often the case that the designers showing at fashion week who generate the greatest stir in the press are those with the fewest stockists. Howell, a designer rarely pictured in the pages of magazines and newspapers, should perhaps take that as an indicator of her success. In a 1980 interview with British Vogue, the now 71 year old explained, “People say my clothes don’t change much, but they do, enormously. It’s the subtleties that alter, more as an evolution than a revolution. Talking over a period of ten years, it’s the minor detail that changes, something that isn’t necessarily immediately obvious. The size of the collar, the combination of fabric and texture, the attitude.” To most people Howell’s work could appear tired, but to those that understand the core of her brand in its aim to produce wearable designs that outlive fashion seasons, this consistency and unmoving dedication is what makes her so great. To this day, everything is manufactured in Britain. Throughout her career Howell has championed materials like Irish linens and Harris tweeds in her work and doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Despite her firm identity as a British designer, Margaret Howell continues to be received best in Japan, where she has around 100 stores in comparison to just five in the UK. In a 2013 interview with The Daily Telegraph she divulged, “I think it’s the quality of the clothes that’s so popular: the comfortable feeling, the attitude of having quality in something that you can wear quite informally.” In the same interview, Kazunori Tomeoka, the managing director and chief operating officer of Anglobal Ltd, who oversee Margaret Howell’s business in Japan, attributes her success to how “Japanese people have a lot of respect for the British. They appreciate how British people treasure heritage, nature and innovation. Japanese people love these British qualities.”
‘“People say my clothes don’t change much, but they do, enormously. It’s the subtleties that alter, more as an evolution than a revolution. Talking over a period of ten years, it’s the minor detail that changes, something that isn’t necessarily immediately obvious. The size of the collar, the combination of fabric and texture, the attitude.”’
The interior of the Margaret Howell flagship store on Wigmore Street in London, featuring original pieces by British furniture company, Ercol, of which Howell is an adamant collector. The photograph originally featured in The New York Times as part of a profile on the designer created by journalist, Sandra Ballentine.
Despite her success which has sustained almost a half century, Howell still regards herself an outsider to the fashion industry, paying no attention to trends and celebrity, her work instead fundamentally anti-fashion with a focus on personal style and functionality. In fact she considers herself to be a product designer if anything. Her work in menswear, womenswear and homeware is always about delivering an object of use and quality rather than pushing boundaries, be that with her eponymous label or MHL, the diffusion workwear line. When entering the flagship store on London’s Wigmore Street it is clear that her customers, for the most part, share the same unfussy approach. Honey coloured wood spans the some fifteen metre length of the shop floor, interrupted only by purist white paint walls, metal clothes rails distributed at perfect evenness with garments and the odd piece of furniture: a stool here and a table decorated sparingly with a ceramic bowl or vase there. Lit almost entirely by natural light glaring through the slanted glass roof, the shop is uncluttered and refreshingly laid back in comparison to it’s counterparts just a few street corners away. The navy coloured sea of shop assistants are instructed not to trouble customers with suggestions or advice, as it is generally the case that Margaret Howell customers, who “aren’t, for the most part trendy” as she explained in a 1995 interview in The Times; will know exactly what they are looking for already. Nowadays Howell divides her time between her Edwardian town house in Blackheath, South East London, and her Central London office, as well as frequently fleeing the city for her two-story 1960s modernist house on the Suffolk coast designed by architect, Rudy Mock. When visiting her home in Blackheath in 1998, Nilgin Yusuf noted that it was “quite an ordinary house, but with traces of an extraordinary woman” in her feature for The Times. Margaret Howell’s name is accompanied by a series of letters: CBE (awarded in 2007 for services to the fashion industry), RDI (Royal Designer for Industry presented by the Royal Society of Designers), Professor (she was presented with an honorary professorship by the University of Creative Arts in 2013). Her presence in the fashion industry may be somewhat muted but legacy should be loud.
A model stands by the fountain in Regents Park, London, wearing a loose fitting black blazer, striped polo-shirt, white linen narrow trousers rolled up at the hem and belted with a thin white leather belt just above the hips, dark socks and soft leather black Derby shoes. Photographed by Alasdair McLellan as part of the Margaret Howell S/S18 campaign look book.