Meet the British style guru whose perfectly detailed, understated and fad-bucking clothes have earned her “design classic” status.

People tend to talk about the design of clothing as if it’s a completely different, and far more frivolous, discipline than the design of other objects, such as chairs, or books, or buildings (try calling an architect “on trend” at your next cocktail party, if you fancy seeing someone choke on a canapé). Of course, in some ways it is: you have the scale of the industry, its capricious seasonality, the attendant pressure for designers to continually push out new ideas. But then again you have a designer such as Ms Margaret Howell.

Born in 1946 in Surrey, a verdant suburb of London, Ms Howell is one of Britain’s most quietly influential arbiters of style. Currently living between Lewisham, south east London and Suffolk, where she owns a 1960s modernist holiday house, she is an icon of understated taste – the kind of person who collects beautiful pebbles as eagerly as modernist furniture, who finds it difficult to design shoes because, as she told The Telegraph in 2009, “I only like a few things, you see.”

Seemingly unphased by the passing fads of the fashion world, she creates items that will stay in your wardrobe forever, and adapt to many a situation. Consider this spring’s perfectly cut poplin shirts; comfortably worn-in cotton work jackets; a sturdy raincoat in cobalt blue. In short, she has an innate knack for producing understated classic, her perennially stylish collections addressing that most onerous of human design challenges: life.

Ms Howell founded her business with partner Mr Paul Renshaw (they married in 1974 but are now divorced) in the early 1970s, shortly after she graduated from a fine art degree at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She says she was “destined” to be a designer because she relishes a brief: even at art school, it was the project-based investigations of different disciplines such as printing, or sculpture, that caught her interest rather than the do-what-thou-wilt attitude of the latter years. Having said that, her artistic education and love of drawing has always imbued her designs, even on paper, with a sense of emotion and purpose, an imaginative reading not just of how each piece would look, but what the experience of wearing it would be.

“I used to draw my designs, thinking how they would feel,” she says, explaining the genesis of her ideas, which often start with a fabric. “I seem to have this sort of intuitive sense of quality, whether it was tactile or just visual.”

The Margaret Howell brand started with characteristic simplicity – initially, Ms Howell specialised solely in men’s shirts of her own design, working with a single pattern cutter and finisher, before opening a workshop in 1973 that supplied wholesale to clients including Ralph Lauren and Paul Smith (both of whom, at that point, sold other brands in their stores). Expanding into a full range of men’s clothing, she opened her first shop in London in 1977, adding womenswear in the 1980s. Throughout, she wasn’t thinking about the “spring collection” or the “seasonal theme”, she was creating items that she thought were needed.

“If I designed a pair of trousers or a jacket, it was just that one that I wanted to wear at that time… or that was right for the time,” she says. “I didn’t design in ranges, I designed each thing because the idea would come as an individual thing. You know, a raincoat in corduroy, that looks like a raincoat but it’s actually a thick corduroy coat. The concept, it comes as a one-off. That’s how I work. And every last detail of that thing would be chosen to complement something else. The buttons, the linings, everything.”

Today, as in the 1970s, Ms Howell’s pared-back collections (encompassing both the more refined Margaret Howell mainline and MHL, which focuses more on the cotton and workwear garments) could be thought of as the style manifestation of Mr Dieter Rams’ 10 principles of good design (Mr Rams’ 606 shelving system is, in fact, a key feature of many a Margaret Howell store). Her clothes exhibit nothing extraneous, are refined down to the last detail and are created to be used and useful, not just as objects of luxury.

It’s hardly surprising considering how much of a design aficionado she is herself. As well as sponsoring London’s Open House weekend (during which owners of interesting or unique properties open their homes for public viewing) since 2003, she has long filled her stores with exhibitions and limited-edition products from UK designers and makers, including Anglepoise (the Sir Kenneth Grange-designed lamp is a firm favourite) and furniture brand ercol, whom she collaborated with in the early 2000s to reissue a range of vintage chair designs. To her, the juxtaposition of the clothes with these design classics makes perfect sense.

“When it comes down to it they’re the same sort of values, whether it’s a chair or a piece of clothing. I’m not really into designing something just for a show or just for decoration. Design is about aesthetic and usefulness, I think. That’s why sometimes the objects that one loves just come through being what they are.”

So you’ve picked up your perfectly cut MHL worker jacket and are looking for additional inspiration to see you through the next decade. Type the following names into Google for a masterclass in the British design tradition of simplicity, utility and longevity.

Mr Lucian Ercolani (ercol)

The Italian-born entrepreneur set up ercol (then Furniture Industries), with the opening of his first factory in 1920. Though in the mid 1950s he was nearly 70, he spent that year designing some of the most beloved British furniture pieces of all time, including the Windsor Love Seat, daybed and Butterfly chair.

Mr Robin and Ms Lucienne Day

The designer power couple of the post-war era. Mr Day was a furniture designer, who designed many powerfully simple pieces for Hille, most notably his innovative injection moulded polypropylene chair of 1963. Ms Day, meanwhile, was a genius of print, who designed many abstract-art inspired prints that, for their optimism and deft use of colour, are still much in demand today.

Sir Kenneth Grange

A founding partner of influential design agency Pentagram, industrial designer Sir Grange has been responsible for the design of many objects embedded into the British popular psyche, including the Kodak Instamatic camera (1963) the British Rail InterCity train (1976) and the redesign of the Anglepoise Type 75 lamp (2003).

Sir Terence Conran

The designer (now a multifaceted design consultant, businessman and property magnate) founded Habitat in the 1964, thus bringing high-end design values to the British middle classes and creating what can only be described as the Conran aesthetic, a mixture of modernism’s clean, open-plan spaces with a cosy British eclecticism. His Conran stores in London, Paris and across Japan are still notable for their excellent range of contemporary designers as well as their comfortable, market-like atmosphere. The true inculcation into the Conran way of life, however, comes at his restaurants – try stepping into the Conran-designed Bluebird in Chelsea, or the Prescott-Conran owned Boundary in Shoreditch without pointing at something and thinking “I want one of those”.

Mr Jasper Morrison

Like his contemporary Mr Marc Newson, Mr Morrison manages to combine the simplicity and understatement of mid-century design with a forward-looking, futuristic sheen in everything he turns his hand to, from furniture (his space-y Low Pad lounge chair of 1999 is a highlight) to accessories (see his 2010 watches for Rado) to, most surprisingly, the bus stop shelters he designed for Vitra’s site in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 2006.