London Couture and the Making of a Fashion Centre

In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy.

Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently Fren…