transformed Burberry. She shrugged off its terracescheck image problem, unapologetically closed an economically unviable polo-shirt factory that employed 304 people in Rhondda, South Wales, and helped cement the position of the hugely focused Yorkshireman Christopher Bailey as its creative overlord. Her business nous has thoroughly polished a once rough-around-the-edges, all-british business into the smoothly run international brand it is today.

It’s not just Burberry: look beneath the red, white and blue in which they wrap themselves, and many – if not most – famous “British” fashion companies turn out to be only partially so. Here are just a few examples; Stella Mccartney is 50 per cent Frenchowned, and Alexander Mcqueen is 100 per cent French-owned (both by the same company, PPR). Dunhill is owned by Richemont (Swiss); Paul Smith is 40 per cent Japanese; Mulberry belongs to a Singaporean billionaire; Thomas Pink is part of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy empire; Hackett is Spanish; Church’s shoes belongs to Prada, and Gieves & Hawkes has just been sold by one Hong Kong company to another.

All of these excellent companies employ plenty of Britons, and some (notably Church’s and Mulberry) even do so in thriving, lovingly nurtured factories, as well as behind their tills or in their flashy central London HQS. Yet their success suggests that being entirely British can be something of a handicap for “British” fashion brands. And the reason for this, I think, is that these owners or managers – who aren’t British – understand that the people who truly value British fashion and British know-how (and who really want to buy it) aren’t British, either.

Paul Smith sells far more of his jackets and shirts in Japan than in Britain. Similarly, the brilliant English designer Margaret Howell is idolised there, but strictly a niche player here. Burberry’s Bond Street store is full of Chinese customers, not British ones. International expansion, particularly into the US and Asia, is fuelling Mulberry’s protean Burberrylike financial performance, and I meet many more aficionados of Church’s and other classic English shoemakers in Milan or Paris than I do in London.

The performance of Jaeger – which sells only in Britain – has not been terrible for the past few years, but its bunting-bedecked 125th anniversary celebrations in 2009 didn’t excite British shoppers in nearly the way that foreign customers, had it had any, would have reacted. And the fatal flaw in Tillman’s deal to acquire Aquascutum in 2009 was that it came without the rights to sell in Asia, which were retained by a Hong Kong holding group named YGM Trading.

On my regular visits to the magnificent old Aquascutum flagship store on Regent Street, it was American and Asian tourists who were buying up trenchcoats by the bagful, not Brits. If YGM isn’t now weighing up whether to take on full ownership of the company, then it really should be.

Brands that parade their British-tinted shopfronts to the world, not just domestically, are the ones that really succeed in the 21st century. Because we, the perverse British, don’t seem particularly fussed whether what we wear is British or not. Just look at the success of English brand Superdry, which pretends to be Japanese, or sometimes American, too, but absolutely never homegrown.

It’s a shame. The only exception to this rule that I can think of is Barbour: family-owned, British-made (in South Shields), and – by jingo – selling unstoppably both at home and abroad. I’m surprised the French didn’t buy it years ago.