Milestones

DIED. Laura Ashley, 60, Welsh-born designer who with her husband Bernard turned her Victorian-inspired, flower-sprigged fabrics into ruffled, romantic fashions and a multimillion-dollar international clothing and housewares empire; of head injuries sustained in an accidental fall; in Coventry, England. What began in 1953 with tea towels silk-screened on the kitchen table of their London flat and sold to local shops became in 1967 the first Laura Ashley shop in London and is today a family-run business encompassing more than 200 shops from Milan to Melbourne, 70 of them in the U.S.