Laura Ashley has discovered less is more in the 1990s

AND SO, another seemingly immutable institution has proved itself vulnerable to changing popular taste. This week Laura Ashley, a label synonymous with floral frocks and broderie anglaise blouses, opened a new advertising campaign in the United States with the slogan "Laura Ashley - say it without flowers".

The company, founded in the 1950s by London stockbroker Bernard Ashley and his wife Laura, originally produced tea towels and gardening smocks. It enjoyed huge global expansion during the 1970s but even by the time Ms Ashley died in 1985, there were signs that its essentially pastoral view of design was falling out of favour.

Since then, Laura Ashley has struggled to retain its share of the market in the face of falling sales and research which suggested potential customers viewed the label as outdated. In the Grafton Street Dublin, branch of the chain last Thursday, many items of clothing were carrying sale tags; a flower spattered dress of the kind with which Laura Ashley made its reputation could be bought for £30 less than its original asking price.

Given that March should be the height of the selling season for spring, reductions of this kind do not bode well.

Fashion, it's clear, has moved on since Laura Ashley opened its first outlet in Dublin 18 years ago. At the time, a drop waisted shift dress in corduroy or a voluminous taffeta evening outfit with leg of mutton sleeves appeared to be the height of every girl's aspirations.

Laura Ashley offered pretty clothes suggesting a pre industrial and essentially rural world, a view reinforced by the company's equally successful move into home furnishings where pillow slips embroidered with wild flowers and chintz wallpapers still predominated.

But just as the public's fondness for shepherdess dresses had waned, so too has its passion for country style interiors. In 1995, Laura Ashley hired Ann Iverson, formerly with Mothercare, as its US chief executive to overhaul the business. She has been responsible for the new advertising campaign and for employing Basha Cohen as head of design with a brief to produce understated modern classics. That means no more purple pufIball skirts or navy velvet peplum jackets.

Laura Ashley's current difficulties, by no means exclusive to this company, represent a fundamental shift in taste away from stripped pine, dried flower arrangements and ruched fabrics to something simpler and cleaner in outlook. Just as fashion has jettisoned fussy clothes in favour of a stripped back style, so architecture and home design now emphasise open space and generous light.

The April edition of Elle Decoration makes a direct correlation between fashion and furnishing, saying that in the last few years, many designers such as Donna Karan and Calvin Klein have begun producing lines for the modern home.

This is a trend which has been steadily gathering momentum during the present decade, according to Melanie Morris, editor of the young Irish style magazine D'Side.

"Basically, I think it's a kickback which always happens with the next generation," she says. "People who grew up with all that floral wallpaper and chintzy curtains now want something different. Taste in the Nineties is about lightness and purity for clothes as well as the house. It's different from the matt black which was popular with some people in the 1980s; that aggressive minimalism is too extreme right now."

Still, even if not quite so aggressive any more, the move towards minimalism looks unstoppable. Worldwide, the mood appears to be in favour of an almost monastic downsizing. Japanese minimalist designer Tadao Ando was this week presented with Britain's 1997 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture while over here, architect Paul Keogh recently received an RIAI award for a Dublin mews house refurbished in understated style ash floors throughout, metal balustrading on the stairs, large windows and open plan interior.

"I've definitely noticed a change in the direction of a stripped back style," Keogh agrees. "The emphasis is on daylight and open spaces. Even in old houses, people are less inclined now to follow slavishly the styles of the period. Everyone wants lots of light and room."

Accordingly, it's no surprise that the most fashionable furnish shop in Dublin at the moment should be called Minima. Full of quietly tasteful objects, Minima's stock is free of floral motifs. In fact, the only flowers are single stems placed in large glass vases. This represents the new approach to design just as Laura Ashley embodies the old.

Whether the latter can make the transition to 1990s taste is questionable, not least because its former image was so successful that the very name Laura Ashley now suggests a Marie Antoinette like Eden. In the pared back 1990s there simply is no place for rus in urbe fantasies.