Windsmoor

Windsmoor was registered as a trademark in 1939 by Lionel Green, who, with his brothers, had been running a wholesale clothing business selling directly to retailers.

Windsmoor’s characteristic product was traditional, tailored clothing, using quality woollen textiles produced by long-established British mills, such as Aked’s worsted. The firm grew due to innovative strategies in marketing and product placement. Green pioneered the practice of placing manufacturer’s concession shops within department stores, sponsored a weekly radio show, and hired the well-known newspaper illustrator Robb to work on a high-profile post-war advertising campaign.

By the end of the 1940s one could ‘Look your best in Windsmoor’ and see Robb’s coloured fashion plates adorning not only magazines, but also hoardings erected in front of still-gaping London bomb sites.

By 1954 the company had such a profile that they were name-checked by Betjeman in his poem ‘Middlesex’, which sketched the suburbanization of the so-called Metroland on the fringes of London:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
Runs the red electric train,
With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s
Daintily alights Elaine;
Hurries down the concrete station
With a frown of concentration,
Out into the outskirt’s edges
Where a few surviving hedges
Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again
Well cut Windsmoor flapping lightly,
Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green
Hiding hair which, Friday nightly,
Delicately drowns in Dreen;
Fair Elaine the bobby-soxer,
Fresh-complexioned with Innoxa,
Gains the garden – father’s hobby –
Hangs her Windsmoor in the lobby,
Settles down to sandwich supper and the television screen.

Windsmoor still manufactures middle-market ladieswear and most of their present outlets are niches in larger department stores. The company’s stylistic identity is associated with the traditional, sometimes countrified, tastes of the English lady. They are now part of the Jacques Vert group, which took control of Windsmoor’s ailing parent company William Baird, the Scottish-based textile company, in 2002.

Written by vintage-voyager.com

from 1940s camel hair coat

Courtesy of tickeryboo

from a 1970s jacket

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from a 1980s skirt

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