Margaret Howell

Margaret Howell dates the beginning of it to an object rather than to a decision. “In 1970 I was encouraged by finding – at a jumble sale – an old, yet finely stitched pinstripe shirt.” She began making shirts, and shirting has been the center of the work ever since. The company still makes them in its own workroom in north London.

She calls herself a hands-on designer and says that “make is integral to my design philosophy” and that “It is crucial how a piece of clothing feels when worn.” What she is after is a garment that is “relaxed and lived in, a natural look.” The attention goes into cloth, and into the people who make it: hand-woven Harris tweed, the irregular slub of Irish linen, part hand-made raincoats with Mackintosh, cashmere from Scottish knitting factories. The rest of her references are not clothing at all. She names Anglepoise lamps, Ercol furniture, and Robert Welch stainless steel cutlery, mid-century British objects she describes as timeless functional design, which is a fair description of what she has spent fifty years making.

The garment most people know is the M025, the red corduroy jacket Jack Nicholson wears in The Shining, which Proper Magazine points out was actually Nicholson’s own. A screen-used jacket was offered at auction in 2018, and the house reissued the design in brown and black in 2020. It is a good story and it is a footnote. Speaking to Vogue, Howell put the actual aim more plainly: “What I’m interested in is designing clothes for the working active lifestyle.”

MHL by Margaret Howell

Margaret Howell works in two collections, and they are separate lines rather than one line at two levels. MHL by Margaret Howell is the working half. The house’s own account is that the label “evolved from an attraction to the functional details and durable cotton fabrics found in workwear,” and that it is made accordingly, with coarser thread, bar-tacking, twin needle stitching, and its signature corozo brace buttons. The main line is the refined half of the same eye.

The house puts the relationship between them this way: “The contrasting refinement of the Margaret Howell collection with the tough, utilitarian character of MHL. combine to reflect the essence of Margaret’s design ethos.” Two collections working in tandem, then, and neither of them a version of the other. We carry both, and we describe them separately because they were made separately.

Where the two share a name they do not share a garment. The Flap Pocket Blazer exists on both lines: on the main line in a Glencheck wool, on MHL in a wool with cotton spun into it. Both are cut relaxed, so the cut is not the difference between them. The cloth is.

Margaret Howell at W Department

We carry the main line and MHL together, which is why the two are set out above before any garment is. The main line runs to shirting, blazers in wool and in linen, knitwear, trousers, and dresses. MHL runs to the work shapes: aprons, painters’ trousers, big-pocket swing shirts, polos, worker jackets, and cropped bombers, in durable cottons.

The house does not size on one system. Some pieces are numbered and some are lettered, and the two are not translations of one another. Call the shop if you are choosing between pieces, and particularly if you are choosing across the two lines.

Continue Exploring

• All Margaret Howell. Both lines together, shirting through outerwear.
• Shirts at W Department. Where this house is easiest to judge, next to everyone else’s.
• Studio Nicholson. A London house that designs its cloth with the mills first and cuts second.
• Nigel Cabourn. British work clothing taken from the garments themselves rather than from ideas about them.
• How to Build a Wardrobe. Our writing on gathering slowly rather than seasonally, which is the argument this house has been making since the 1970s.
• The Fabric Care Guide. How to look after cotton shirting, linen, wool, and cashmere.
• The Library. Our writing on the houses we carry, plus the monthly playlist.
• Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.

Shop Margaret Howell

The main line and MHL by Margaret Howell, men’s and women’s.