A Hundred Years of M&S: How a Leeds Market Stall Dressed Britain

There is a reasonable argument that no institution has shaped how British people actually dress more than Marks & Spencer. Not the designers, not the magazines, not the boutiques — a chain of shops selling sensible knickers, school jumpers and machine-washable jumpers to more or less everyone.

M&S marks a hundred years of fashion in 2026, dated from the opening of its drapery department in 1926. It’s a fitting moment to look at how a Leeds market stall ended up as the default wardrobe of a nation.

The penny bazaar

The business begins in 1884, when Michael Marks, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, set up a stall in Leeds. The founding idea was a pricing gimmick and a very good one: a section of the stall where everything cost a penny, under the sign “Don’t ask the price — it’s a penny.”

The appeal was not novelty. It was the removal of haggling, which in the 1880s was still how most market transactions worked and which disadvantaged anyone who was poor, foreign, shy or a woman shopping alone. Fixed, visible, universal pricing was a democratic act dressed up as a sales tactic, and it established something that ran through the business for the next century: M&S sold to everybody on the same terms.

In 1894 Marks took on Tom Spencer, a cashier, as a partner. The name has not changed since.

1926: the drapery counter

By the 1920s the business had grown into a chain, and in 1926 it opened its drapery department — the point from which M&S dates its century in fashion.

This was not a fashion department in any sense a magazine would recognise. It sold underwear, hosiery, basic garments. The earliest bra in the company’s archive dates from the late 1920s. But the significance is in the model rather than the merchandise: M&S was selling clothing directly to a mass market at fixed prices with a promise of consistent quality, at a time when most British people either made their own clothes, had them made, or bought them secondhand.

Ready-to-wear as an ordinary British experience essentially starts here.

St Michael, 1928

Two years later, Simon Marks — Michael’s son, by then running the company — created a sub-brand and named it after his father. St Michael.

It began as a quality mark rather than a label, applied only to goods manufactured to M&S’s own specifications. That distinction is the whole story of the company’s next fifty years. Rather than buying whatever wholesalers offered, M&S went directly to British manufacturers and dictated the specification: this fibre, this construction, this durability, this price. Suppliers who couldn’t meet it lost the contract.

The effect on British clothing manufacturing was enormous. For decades, the standard M&S set was, in practice, the standard for mass-market British clothing generally. By the 1950s St Michael had stopped being a quality mark on selected items and become the M&S own-brand outright, appearing on everything the company sold.

If you grew up in Britain before 2000, you did not think of St Michael as a brand. It was simply the words printed inside your clothes.

The long middle

For most of the postwar period M&S occupied a position that’s genuinely difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t live through it. It was not aspirational and it was not cheap. It was correct. The clothes were well made, unfashionable in a deliberate way, and bought by the professional classes and the working classes alike without much sense that this was unusual.

The business rested on three things: British manufacturing, obsessive quality control, and a customer base that trusted the label more than it trusted its own judgement.

All three eroded at roughly the same time. Global sourcing made the domestic supply chain uncompetitive. Specialist retailers — Next, Gap, and later the fast-fashion operators — got much better at fashion. And the customer who bought clothes because they were correct was replaced by a customer who wanted them to be interesting.

St Michael was retired in 2000, during a period of serious financial difficulty. It’s a small detail, but it marks the end of something.

The recovery, and what it was built on

The years since have been a long, uneven attempt to answer a hard question: what is a mass-market clothing retailer for, once it is no longer the arbiter of quality?

The answers that worked were mostly a return to first principles. Sub-brands like Autograph and Per Una carved out distinct customer groups. Investment went back into fabric — the cashmere, the merino, the cotton — on the reasonable theory that if M&S couldn’t out-fashion Zara, it could out-material it. Fit was taken seriously again. The proposition became, roughly, better cloth than the price suggests, which is close to what it had always been.

It has largely worked. M&S clothing is currently in a stronger position than at almost any point since the nineties.

The centenary

Which brings us to 2026, and a company using its hundredth fashion year to make a specific argument about itself.

In September, M&S will show on the official London Fashion Week schedule for the first time — a see-now-buy-now collection presented on 18 September. And it has brought back St Michael, handing the label to Aries, a London streetwear brand, for a 26-piece collection.

Both moves are doing the same work. They’re a claim that M&S is a fashion business with a hundred-year archive rather than a shop that sells clothes as a sideline. The archive claim is entirely fair — few British clothing brands have a deeper one, and almost none have one that so many people have personally worn.

Whether the fashion claim lands is a different question, and the honest answer is that it may not matter much. M&S’s actual achievement was never on a runway. It was in making decently made clothing an ordinary expectation for ordinary British people, at a fixed and visible price, for a hundred years.

That started with a sign on a Leeds market stall saying don’t ask the price. Everything since is a footnote.