Laura Ashley; Founded Fashion Empire : Head Injuries She Suffered in Fall Prove Fatal to Designer, 60

Designer Laura Ashley, who started a spare-time textile business on her kitchen table and turned it into a fashion empire with 180 shops around the world, died early Tuesday from head injuries sustained in a fall nine days ago.

Mrs. Ashley died at a hospital in the city of Coventry after lapsing into a coma following the accident, which occurred the day before her 60th birthday at the home of her daughter, Jane.

Born Sept. 9, 1925, in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil and reared amid the beauty of the Welsh countryside, Mrs. Ashley designed small-patterned fabrics, women’s clothing and household furnishings reminiscent of 19th-Century rural England and later opened a series of shops to sell her designs.

Recognizable by the rustic prints, high collars and lace trims, her creations became so well-known that the “Laura Ashley look” has become synonymous with Victorian English designs.

‘Self-Effacing Genius’

“She changed the look of houses and the way people dressed in an astonishing way,” said Judy Brittain, home fashion editor of Britain’s Vogue magazine. “It was the work of a rare, quiet, self-effacing genius.”

At the time of her death, the Laura Ashley Group employed more than 4,000 persons and distributed its products through its retail stores in Europe, Asia and North America. More than 50 of these outlets are in the United States, by far the group’s largest market.

Still owned by the Ashley family though plans have been made to offer the stock publicly, the group last year registered global sales of more than $150 million.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often referred to Mrs. Ashley as an example of the type of entrepreneurial success she wants to foster in Britain.

Mrs. Ashley described herself as a romantic and said the popularity of her styles represented nostalgia for the uncomplicated, unchallenged values of a more innocent time.

Job Called Part Time

Despite her enormous success, Mrs. Ashley described her job as part time and told an interviewer that “making a wonderful home, keeping a beautiful garden and cooking--that is the perfect part of my life.”

She maintained her firm’s headquarters and major production units in the small town of Carno in rural Wales, even after it became a major company. Its U.S. production is also rural-based--in the mountain village of McKee, Ky.

“I think our product will help people have a calmer, more well-ordered existence,” she said in a 1983 interview with Women’s Wear Daily.

She credited her husband, Bernard, who is chairman of the Laura Ashley Group, with having the hard business sense that made her designs so successful in the marketplace. Two of their four children also hold executive positions in the company.

Theirs was a partnership that began 32 years ago when, pregnant with their first child, Mrs. Ashley passed the time by silk-screening place mats and scarfs on an old kitchen table in a rented attic apartment in London’s Pimlico district.

Initial Investment

Bernard Ashley later joked that the original investment in the business was 10 British pounds, $28 at the time. They sold their goods to local shops and then to larger London department stores.

Mrs. Ashley’s eye for colors and patterns spurred demand, and less than a year later her husband gave up his accountant’s job in the London financial district and bought and adapted a $400 fabric-printing machine. A struggling painter named Burt was hired to help with the printing, and the family business was off the ground.

To ease the costs of expansion, the family moved to rural southeast England in the late 1950s, opened its first showroom in London and in 1961 transferred themselves and their company’s production to Carno in Wales.

In his brief written history of the business, Bernard Ashley recalled that it was in those rural settings that the first of the now-famous Laura Ashley design patterns began to emerge.

From place mats and scarfs, Mrs. Ashley branched out, first to other table linens and aprons, then to dresses and eventually to household articles, including curtains, sheets, wallpaper and even paints.

Her first two dress designs were retailed in the early 1960s, selling for $4.20 and $5.60.

Worldwide Growth

Since the mid-1960s, the Laura Ashley family business has known only growth, expanding sales in Europe, Canada, the United States, Singapore and, more recently, Japan.

In the United States, Laura Ashley sales outlets are found from mid-town Manhattan to Los Angeles. Group plans published late last year called for 15 additional retail stores in the United States in 1985.

In recent years, Mrs. Ashley turned over much of the detailed design work to members of a team she put together. But she still influenced the company’s design trends and peppered her design team with ideas and sample patterns.

Exact details of Mrs. Ashley’s mishap on Sept. 8 remain unclear. It was initially reported she had fallen down stairs, but a company spokesman Tuesday described the fall only as “a silly domestic incident.”