EXCLUSIVE: Laura Ashley Celebrates 70th Anniversary With Batsheva
In 2021, Batsheva Hay and Laura Ashley teamed up to create their first collaborative ready-to-wear collection filled with archival, colorful Laura Ashley prints. The partnership was a natural one — Hay’s entire namesake brand originated after wearing a vintage Laura Ashley dress “to threads,” the designer told WWD of her deeply personal connection to the label.
To celebrate Laura Ashley’s 70th anniversary, the duo is releasing their fourth limited-edition Laura Ashley x Batsheva collaborative collection, featuring a Coney Island Beach set and campaign featuring Hay in the playful, girly looks with photographs by her husband, Alexei.
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“The anniversary felt like a special moment for the prints, and one to really dig into the very essence of Laura Ashley. The entire beach shoot, for me, was also that because for the other capsules I’ve done so far, we shot in places that are outdoors, but not necessarily ‘very Laura Ashley.’ The old Laura Ashley catalogs would be in the Welsh countryside or on the beach in England, so I really spent a lot of time looking through as many of the old catalogs as the company had in their archives, really going into some of those beach shoots.
“There are a few photographs where I’m wearing the white hat with the tulle — there were so many [archival] light tulle hats, that sort of thing. It just worked so well. Because I was trying to pick those quintessential, beautiful, spring-summer Laura Ashley prints, it was the perfect moment for that quintessential beach shoot,” Hay said, adding that “things came up” inevitably shooting on the amusement park adjacent to the beach. For instance, Coney Island’s Polar Bear Club swimming or a group of people making a music video wearing a giant eyeball, which naturally became part of the campaign shoot and added a cheeky spirit to the already playfully pretty, layered print-on-print looks.
To mark the anniversary, Hay noted the importance of reissuing Laura Ashley’s most precious and archival motifs — the focus being on the brand’s pastel Tulips and light blue Honigtopf Shells prints.
“With the anniversary, I think that it was a lot more of a global vision with the company about those prints that are the most precious and archival. We really coordinated on this Tulips print — they are focusing on this print for the anniversary, and I thought it’d be fun to make a tie-in with a dress to the matching duvet cover and pillow set. We were thinking about bringing an entire bed onto the beach — but we did have the duvet covers and pillows,” Hay said of one of the campaign images, featuring the designer midair (the trampoline was noted as one of the items Hay’s team did bring on location), donning a long-sleeved, midlength, roomy dress with matching pillow in hand (Laura Ashley relaunched its home collection in 2021).
Other styles throughout the collection take cues from an ‘80s design aesthetic, such as ruched dresses (like a bestselling square-neck minidress) and playful tops, and includes the launch of trousers and shorts for the first time.
“We did these pants, called the Hauls trouser — it’s almost a pirate shape, I love it, and there’s a pair of shorts that flare out, these kind of very ‘80s bottoms. I’d actually never done a pant or pair of shorts for Laura Ashley, rather long skirts, so I tried to do some pieces that are not just cottagecore. There’s a spaghetti top, the Becca blouse, that is a little tank you could wear with jeans in a Honigtopf Shells print in light blue — there are a few pieces in that print,” Hay said. “Then I did a few dresses that are kind of amazing with this whole spring-summer thing with having your sleeves fall off. There’s a gown that actually has boning in it — it’s a gown in the way the Laura Ashley catalogs would, they’d always have bridal-level dresses — and I did it in two prints, the tulips and a very chintzy brick color. Those are really the standouts — it’s not the one you’d necessarily wear to work, but is a major dress.”
When asked what Laura Ashley’s 70th anniversary meant to her, Hay said, “I think, first of all, as a designer, it’s very meaningful to have work associated with a person that had such a specific vision and a whole lifestyle around that long. It’s pretty spectacular, especially for a woman in fashion,” Hay said. “There’s so much I connect to about the brand — its unique aesthetic, its simple unpretentiousness but beautiful focus on a whole world. There’s so much it stands for that has been really influential for me — my mother loved Laura Ashley, my grandmother would buy me little Laura Ashley things. To know it’s endured this long is amazing and that some of those things are just treasures from back then. Then the importance of preserving the artwork and assets — especially from back then, when so much gets lost. That amount of time is so special to have anything saved so nicely from.”
The Laura Ashley x Batsheva capsule collection is made up of 28 limited-edition, 100 percent cotton styles, priced $105 to $325, and is being released Monday.
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