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Margaret Howell opened her first and only Italian store back in January 2015, during trade show Pitti in Florence. Until this Tuesday afternoon, she had never once returned. “It’s very good to be back here after 10 years,” observes the 77-year-old, who made her comeback to celebrate the anniversary of the store opening. “To see it so well lived-in.”
“Well lived-in”, is something that Howell aficionados tend to most relish about her garments, while Howell’s own label is itself supremely well lived-in: she founded it in 1970. The instinct and values that shape her products were formed before concepts such as slow fashion or ethical consumption were even articulated, yet they in many ways epitomise them.
The Florence store, currently decorated with finely photographed close-ups of Howell archive pieces in materials from — or manufactured by — partners including Carraro, Lardini, Tivoli and Mantero, sits on the north side of the city’s Ponte alla Carraia, on Piazza Carlo Goldoni. Also serendipitously, Caroline Attwood, the label’s CEO since last November, lived in this very same building at the turn of the millennium when she worked for LVMH. “I just bumped into my old landlady,” reports Attwood. “She couldn’t believe it!”
The Mulberry alum says she is taking a deliberately considered approach to her new role at Margaret Howell. “It’s something that’s so consistent. So how do you take it forward?” Coming in September is a new website, she offers. “The unsexy things — the processes and the infrastructure — are very important.”
Attwood adds: “We’re ambitious behind the scenes but we’re not grabbing, and we’re not in a hurry. Margaret’s history has shown that being slow and steady works.”
What also works for Howell is the stability created by its ownership. In 1990, the company was majority acquired by Japan’s Anglobal, and today the company has 82 stores in that country as part of a retail footprint that also include Margaret Howell-branded cafés. While the vast majority of Howell’s operations are done in Japan, design and the label’s business elsewhere is overseen from London.
The Surrey-born designer is breathtakingly untroubled by matters beyond her métier. When I suggest it was serendipitous to open this store and production office — designed to more intimately connect with the Italian suppliers who provide around 50 per cent of her raw materials and manufacture 32 per cent of her products — the year before the Brexit referendum, she replies: “Well, these are questions for other people in the company. I don’t think about these things really, because I’m here to do the design.”
Art and androgyny
In London last week, Howell was wearing the exact same black V-neck sweater and micro-gingham shirt that she was also sporting in Italy. As well as being another testament to her consistency, this reflects one of her earliest influences. “I went to a co-ed secondary school and that feeling of equality between boys and girls — the mix — was something I very much enjoyed,” she says.
Howell was raised in the British countryside during the 1950s. “I have grown up in nature. We used to have our playtime sitting on tufts of grass on common land, and those textures are something I still remember. And growing up post-war, with our mother making all our clothes, we consequently all started making our own clothes. So it’s about the feel of the fabric and the response to texture as well as colour and pattern.” Today, Howell’s daughter, Miriam, works as part of the design team in London.
Howell studied art at Goldsmiths University, and recalls, “I never thought of it as anything other than experience, and learning, and training your eye; because life drawing is really good for training your eye.” Upon graduation, she decided to use her facility for craft to make papier-mâché beads and jewellery, which were photographed for Beatrix Miller’s British Vogue. “One thing led to another and I wanted to do more than making beads.”
She began running up her first shirts for women, pieces that remain in her archive but that she reviews less than glowingly: “They were a little bit decorative — really quite embarrassing now. I did a sort of decorated sleeve with various things. Really awful! Nothing like what I’m known for.” Howell adds that she was not so enchanted by the “out-there” British fashion aesthetic of that post-Youthquake period, and more drawn to the classicism of the looks she saw in French Elle.
She continues: “Also in the very beginning it was quite intrinsically that the urge to make something came from a memory, maybe of my dad’s old raincoat, and how he would come in from the garden smelling of bonfire smoke, or that he had these old shirts that had softened — it was very much about catching a feeling.” Howell adds that her instinct for androgynously versatile garments was further cemented by the informal art school uniform of the time.
In her earliest years, Howell and her partner slept in a bunk bed in their Blackheath flat in order to make space for the machinists to work by day in the space below. Her products were picked up by retailers including Joseph’s Joseph Ettedgui and Mary Wiggin of Coexistence. “Those two were very creative retailers. They drove a new wave. Joseph really put me on the map I think; he displayed my shirts near where the ladies would have their haircuts. And Mary Wiggin at Coexistence stocked the shirts as a piece of design alongside their furniture.”
You could contradictorily venture that the most prominent feature of Howell — the person, the brand, and the products — is discretion. But almost despite that, there have been many moments in the sun. One such moment came when Jack Nicholson picked up a maroon jumbo corduroy blouson at Maxfield in Los Angeles, and specified that he wished to wear the same piece in The Shining. “I got a call and they wanted to order 12 or 13 more. I might be wrong but I like to think maybe the crew wanted one as well,” recalls Howell. Another was when the late Diana, Princess of Wales, commissioned Howell to create the boxy white tuxedo jacket that set the red top publications alight when she wore it to a charity concert in 1984.
Today Howell’s output comprises her mainline and MHL, the sub-brand she established in 2004. Sales divide 70-30 between womenswear and menswear, although, says Attwood: “It’s not that simple, because there’s a lot of fluidity between who buys and who wears the two.”
Attwood is evidently a fast learner when it comes to corporate philosophy — she declines to place cart before horse and disclose too much about her ambitions for the brand. What she does offer, however, is this: “One of the opportunities is to dig into the stories that are already here. Because that’s a way for some customers to engage with us. And we have those stories. There is nothing contrived here.”
Or as Howell puts it, “I never felt I was ‘fashion’. It was just my style.”
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