Margaret Howell

If you value quietly excellent clothes over obvious branding, the label tends to reward you. Margaret Howell describes her own style as understated quality, updated modern classics, and the appeal is precisely that restraint: pieces meant to last and improve with wear rather than chase a season. It is a label you buy when you want the well-made shirt rather than the loud one.

The shirt is the heart of the brand, and it is made accordingly. Howell has been designing, making and selling shirts since 1972, and the company even runs its own shirt factory in Edmonton, north London, opened in 2000. You are paying for that vertical, craft-led approach as much as for the cloth, which is why the well-tailored shirt is one of her keynote designs.

They sit at two ends of Howell's sensibility. The main collection is the refined shirting and tailoring the label is known for, while MHL, introduced in 2004, is the more utilitarian, hard-wearing line. Think of the main line as polished modern classics and MHL as the workwear-minded, everyday counterpart.

Her keynote designs are variations on enduring staples: the well-tailored shirt, the gymslip, the lace-up shoe, the duffel coat and the trench coat. They share an androgynous quality and what has been called a stylish timelessness, marrying traditional British shapes with modern appeal. Start with a shirt or a coat if you want the essence of the brand.

She is a British fashion designer, born 5 September 1946 in Tadworth, Surrey, with a career across men's and women's wear spanning more than five decades. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1969 and was later appointed a CBE and made a Royal Designer for Industry. She continues to live in south-east London.

It grew out of making things by hand. After Goldsmiths she made accessories, and in 1972 she began to design, make and sell shirts from a flat in Blackheath, south-east London. Orders from Joseph in London and US retailers followed, and with Joseph's support a Margaret Howell franchise shop opened on South Molton Street in 1976.

The flagship is on Wigmore Street in London, opened in 2002 and designed with Will Russell of Pentagram. It is spacious enough to hold a design studio, mount exhibitions and host events, and it also retails complementary pieces such as Ercol and Anglepoise that sit alongside her own work.

Yes, and it is one of the label's favourite stories. Nicholson was a fan and insisted on wearing his own Margaret Howell corduroy jacket for his role in 1980's The Shining, which prompted Stanley Kubrick to order twelve duplicates. It is a neat illustration of how naturally her clothes read on screen.

Repeatedly. Grace Coddington chose a Howell piece as Dress of the Year in 1982, and in 2007 Howell was appointed a CBE for services to the retail industry and made a Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts. She has also received honorary doctorates and fellowships from UK institutions.

Her interests run well beyond clothes, into architecture, fine art, modern design, photography and the traditional crafts of the British Isles, all of which feed her work. She has said she is often inspired by the way something is made, and that good design simply has to work, much as a chair has to. That functional, craft-led mindset is the through-line of the brand.