Decades before today's homestead look, Welsh fashion-and-homeware guru Laura Ashley was selling a rural, nostalgic idyll. Now, her romantic, rose-tinted vision of a "simpler life" – and the traditional values attached to it – is more popular than ever. But why?

There's no clearer sign that the prairie look is still gaining popularity than when incongruously sported by an icon of metropolitan life: New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City. In the final season of the show's divisive sequel, And Just Like That, which concluded in August, a trip to her boyfriend Aidan's farmhouse in rural Virginia has her running off to the local store to clothe herself in the lacy collars, puffed sleeves and long floral skirts more commonly seen on 19th Century settlers. Her transition from witty columnist to the writer of Victorian-era romantic fiction sees her throwing off her Manolo Blahniks and dressing like her characters.

And it's not just Carrie. Nostalgia for Victoriana, and the simple way of life it embodies, has seeped into social media via tradwife influencers such as Utah farmer Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm; and on to catwalks and high streets.

Several decades before this 19th Century homestead look spread across the internet, however, there was an earlier revival of nostalgic, romantic fashion, spearheaded by the British clothing and textile designer Laura Ashley, who was born 100 years ago on 7 September 1925. Widely considered an influential tastemaker, she was described as "creating an image of Englishness that women worldwide wanted to buy". Through the 1970s and early 80s her signature rose-tinted, bucolic style was a big mood in UK fashion and homeware.

"I don't think there's anything very special about our things," the Welsh designer told BBC Wales in 1977, batting back the suggestion that she was a "trendsetter". Instead, the designs simply gave women what they needed, and "evolved from necessity". The business had a quintessentially British beginning in 1952, with Ashley, a secretary for the Women's Institute, visiting the organisation's display of traditional handicrafts at the V&A. Inspired by the patchwork textiles, she resolved to make something similar. However, the Victorian fabrics she had admired at the museum, featuring small flowers and delicate stripes, no longer existed: she would have to print her own.

The result – made possible by a rudimentary printing screen fashioned by her husband Bernard – who also co-managed the business – pleased her, and, noting a gap in the market for items that were both pretty and practical, she began making scarves, tea towels, and later, aprons. Bernard had bigger ideas, envisaging reams of upholstery fabric sold wholesale, and so it was Laura's name that went on the label, and stayed there as the orders flooded in.

In 1968, customers queued at the door of the first Laura Ashley shop in South Kensington. By Laura's death in 1985,........

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