Maureen Baker
Fashion designer who created more than 250 outfits for Princess Anne, including her wedding dress
MAUREEN BAKER, who has died aged 97, was, for more than 30 years, head designer at Susan Small, the ready-to-wear fashion brand which once had outlets all over the country and whose outfits were regarded as the epitome of good taste; she made her mark when she was commissioned to design the dress for the wedding of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973.
It was the first time that someone other than an officially designated royal couturier had been chosen for such a key role, and Maureen Baker admitted that she had been surprised to land the commission, having assumed that the job would go to Norman Hartnell. But she and her royal client went back a long way. The Princess had first sought her out at Susan Small when she was 18 and had just left school. She had been recommended by Princess Alexandra, herself a client since the age of 17.
Maureen Baker would design more than 250 outfits for the Princess over 23 years, dressing her for occasions ranging from state banquets to Save the Children missions in Africa, and also providing her wedding trousseau. The Princess, Maureen recalled, always knew exactly what she wanted: “She wanted the clothes to work for her, and not be worried about skirts riding up or pulling jackets down. She wanted to be comfortable. Her look was casually smart, classic and elegant.”
The wedding dress, an exquisite simple white figure-hugging silk gown with pearl-edged Tudor-style trumpet sleeves and a high collar, won enthusiastic reviews in the fashion press and became the defining bridal gown of the 1970s.
Unflappable and totally discreet, Maureen Baker had reportedly turned down an offer of £20,000 to reveal the design of the dress before the big day to an American publication. She herself, however, preferred some of the outfits she created for the royal trousseau, notably a nautical style double-breasted navy blue worsted coat, a black velvet cloak lined with white satin.
Maureen Baker always admired the Princess’s business-like approach, recalling in an interview that “bills were always paid promptly and she never asked for a discount.” She admired her famous thriftiness, too: “Princess Anne wanted clothes to last. She respected them. She would store a dress, carefully covered, then dig it out and make it different with different accessories. I even altered her maternity clothes so she could wear them when she slimmed down … She particularly liked dresses with matching jackets so she could get twice as much wear out of them, worn alone or together.”
She was not surprised, therefore, in 1999 when the Princess Royal stepped out in a Susan Small empire-line silk evening dress she had first worn for a dinner in Berlin in 1973.
It was not the first or the last time the Princess had worn the same dress twice. When Lady Rose Windsor married George Gilman in 2008, she turned up in the Maureen Baker yellow and white print dress she had first worn at the wedding of her brother Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 – when it was described in
Country Life magazine as “one of the prettiest” dresses she had worn in public.
Not that the Princess herself was ever fulsome in her praise. “You are quick,” was said to be the highest compliment Maureen Baker could expect from her royal customer.
One of six children, she was born Evelyn Maureen Porter in Hammersmith, west London, on May 26 1920. Her father was a bookmaker.
She was educated at a convent and began her career with Susan Small, the company founded in the early 1940s by Leslie and Fay Carr Jones, aged 18 as a dressmaking and design apprentice, paid 23 shillings a week “for picking up pins”. Fay Carr Jones appreciated her talents, however, and in 1943 she was appointed the firm’s head designer. In 1948 she married Roy Baker, then a National Serviceman, later a classic car specialist.
Her job, over the 30-odd years she spent with Susan Small, involved travelling the world to keep pace with the latest fashion shows and buy fabrics, and designing two main and two mid-season collections, plus two “trendsetter” collections for the young, per year. “I like designing the sort of clothes I would wear myself,” she told an interviewer in 1962, “casual outfits that will see me through the day and on to a party if I haven’t got time to go home and change”. Examples of her work are held in the collection of the V & A.
Maureen Baker stayed on at Susan Small until the company was taken over by Courtaulds in the mid-1970s, at which point, with Princess Anne’s continuing patronage, she decided to go it alone, founding Maureen Baker Designs in 1978. During the 1980s her clients included Margaret Thatcher, though Maureen Baker was said to have observed that her royal customers were rather more open to suggestion than Britain’s first woman prime minister.
After her husband’s death in 1990, Maureen Baker moved to live near her son, Jon, a music producer and hotelier, in New York, spending her winters at his villa in Port Antonio, Jamaica, but making regular visits to her old home in Dorking to tend to her garden.
Her son survives her.
Maureen Baker, born May 26 1920 died December 5 2017