Austin Reed (retailer)
British fashion retailer
Austin Reed was a British fashion retailer founded in 1900; the brand was acquired by Edinburgh Woollen Mill in 2016.
NKVD officer Vladimir Pravdin wore an Austin Reed suit he purchased from the Regent Street store, abandoning it in a Swiss hotel as he fled after his 1937 assassination of Ignace Reiss.
History
Austin Reed was founded by tailor Austin Leonard Reed (1873–1954).
Timeline
1900 - First shop opened in Fenchurch Street
1911 - Opening of flagship store in Regent Street
1929 - First international outlet on the RMS Aquitania
1930 - Opening of Regent Street Barber Shop
1936 - Opening of a concession on the RMS Queen Mary
1946 - Opening of a concession on the RMS Queen Elizabeth
1940s - Winston Churchill was a customer
1980s - Launch of Austin Reed's womenswear
2000 - UK Manufacturing ended and Crewe factory closed
2005 - Kosugi-Sangyo was the Austin Reed ready-to-wear license holder in Japan
2009 - Austin Reed Group acquired Viyella brand
2011 - Move from 103-113 Regent Street to 100 Regent Street
2016 - Entered administration. Five concessions located in Boundary Mills outlet villages were retained by Edinburgh Woollen Mill.
Austin Reed purchased retailer Country Casuals, rebranding it CC.
In popular culture
Austin Reed is mentioned as potential alternative employment by Captain Peacock on the British situation comedy, Are You Being Served. Cast member John Inman had worked at Austin Reed as a tie clerk in the early 1950s.
“Austin Reed (retailer)” enters the record as british fashion retailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Austin, Reed and retailer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4823255. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 2016, 1937 and 1873.
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This entry incorporates text from “Austin Reed (retailer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.