Obituary: Chelsea Girl and River Island founder Bernard Lewis who has died at the age of 100
Bernard Lewis, widely regarded as the most influential British fashion retailer of the post-war era, died peacefully surrounded by family on 28 February, 18 days after his 100th birthday.
The man behind the creation of the Lewis Separates chain in the 1950s, Chelsea Girl in the 1960s and River Island in the 1980s was a tireless and focused innovator who was determined to do things his way. He was the first to introduce methods of working that became accepted as fashion industry norms.
Publicity-shy for much of his career, he became better known in the past two decades but long before that within the industry Lewis was known as the fashion retailers’ fashion retailer. A demanding but fair boss, he attracted intense loyalty from those who worked closely with him and great respect from those he dealt with, but always his family came first.
Their diverse business interests, including financial asset management, property and hotels, are collected within the Lewis Trust Group.
In 2020 Lewis self-published his official biography, significantly called A Family Business. It was written by Catherine Blyth, who was able to interview many members of the Lewis clan. Across 460 pages, Lewis reveals, often with surprising frankness, the highs and lows of the story of how he achieved his unique success from very humble beginnings.
His father, Louis Pokrasse, was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine. His mother, Clara Tauber, was the daughter of Romanian émigrés who arrived in the UK when she was two. Pokrasse, known as Len when he served in the British army during World War I, changed his name to Leonard Lewis.
The original greengrocer and wool shop. From A Family Business
Leonard and Clara had four sons – David, Bernard, Geoffrey and Godfrey. The family sold fruit and vegetables in various locations across north London with mixed fortunes. In a 2018 interview with The Sunday Times, Lewis recalled “very hard times – absolutely desperate” in the 1930s. After their parents did a moonlight flit from north London to east London, the four boys slept together on a mattress on the floor, their only set of clothes folded at the foot of this bed. The Lewis family story truly was rags to riches.
Lewis’s father died of bronchitis, aged 48, during World War II. The memories of how Len struggled to provide for his family was to greatly shape Bernard Lewis’s attitude to commerce. All four brothers worked together to build up the family success. In the formal style of the 1950s, each was referred to as Mister followed by their first name. For thousands of employees over the years, the founder was known always as Mr Bernard.
In 1946 the 20-year-old Lewis, recently-demobbed from the RAF, built himself a wooden shack on a bomb site on Holloway Road, north London from which to sell fruit and veg, but within two Lewis moved into selling handknitting wools from another self-built unit and textiles won out over soft fruit.
The Lewis name first appeared on a clothes shop in Mare Street, Hackney, east London in 1948. Blouses and skirts – items then referred to as “separates” in the trade – superseded the knitting yarns and building up the Lewis Separates chain began.
By the mid-1950s the young entrepreneur was frustrated at the styles he was offered by clothing wholesalers, so he decided to create his own. He sketched his own ideas of best-sellers, hired a female designer and used manufacturers in London to produce garments that were unique to Lewis Separates. He was probably the first UK fashion retailer to have his own in-house design facility.
By the late 1950s Lewis Separates sold only its own goods. In another innovation, as early as 1962 Lewis went to Hong Kong to seek out new suppliers. He began to go twice a year, bringing back styles that others did not have and establishing long-term relationships with manufacturers.
From the start, Lewis was ambitious and clever with the little money he had. In November and December 1955 he increased the number of shops in London from five to nine. “That took some budgeting as we didn’t have the money to pay for the goods,” he recalled in 2005.
Chelsea Girl in the 1980s
With a remarkable focus on detail, he was always focused on analysing sales, backing the best-sellers, moving on to something new to keep the tills ringing. Even into his nineties, he was obsessed with visiting his shops and his rivals’ shops to see how the merchandise looked in situ.
Brighton was the first Lewis Separates branch outside London. Hull and Glasgow, the 17th and 18th shop respectively, were opened in June 1957 and the chain truly went national. Always obsessed with details, Lewis consistently took a keen interest in the appearance of the shops and ensured the layout and fittings were both attractive and efficient.
By the mid-1960s the business was running around 70 Lewis Separates shops across the country and these were converted fairly quickly to a new boutique concept called Chelsea Girl. Lewis was arguably the first to appreciate that fashionable boutiques, such as those springing up in King’s Road, Chelsea, could be run as a national multiple chain.
Bernard Lewis and Leonard Lewis Chelsea House 1974. From A Family Business
The first Chelsea Girl was opened in Leeds on 13 May 1967. It was an instant success. The company’s method was to test a concept quietly and, if it worked, to roll it out speedily. Being privately-owned, decisions could be taken swiftly.
That was demonstrated again in 1988 when a new retail concept, River Island, was unveiled. Within three years, all the Chelsea Girl shops were converted to River Island, which included menswear that the company had introduced in 1982.
River Island became one of the best-regarded and best-performing fashion chains of the pre-internet era, with around 250 shops in the UK and more than 50 worldwide, generating sales of almost £1bn and pre-tax profit regularly in excess of £100m.
Recent times have been more problematic, due primarily to increased lower-cost competition and the growth of ecommerce. In the year to December 2024 sales dropped to £537m and the company posted a loss of £49m. The business is currently undergoing a significant restructuring that has seen landlords agreeing to lower rents on around 70 stores and 33 stores being closed.
Bernard, the product man, was unmistakeably the leader of the Lewis quartet and was particularly close to his elder brother David, whose expertise lay in accountancy and property. By the late 1970s tensions within the family saw the younger siblings Geoffrey and Godfrey depart.
Bernard Lewis in his design studio in 1983
By that time Leonard Lewis, one of Bernard’s sons from the first of his three marriages, had joined the family business. He is credited with coming up with the River Island idea in the late 1980s. The obvious successor to his father, Leonard’s career was cut short in 1994 when he suffered severe brain damage after falling from his pony while playing polo. His brother Clive then ran the company until 1998 when Richard Bradbury, a Burton Group executive, was appointed managing director of River Island, the first non-family member to hold the position.
Throughout these changes Bernard Lewis remained the family patriarch and the guiding force of the company. Created life president of Lewis Trust Group, he was still regularly coming into the office well into his nineties. His third wife Vanessa, who had joined Chelsea Girl as a buyer in 1970, was his constant companion from 1972 until his death. They had two sons, Sam and Jake.
Today Clive Lewis is chairman of the group and his cousin Ben, a son of David Lewis, is CEO, the second time he has held the position.
A new generation River Island store at centre:mk
In a recent exchange on LinkedIn to mark Bernard Lewis’ 100th birthday, veteran retail analyst Richard Hyman said of him: "A one off. Built three retail brands. Avoided limelight and allowed his businesses to do the talking for him. Totally understood the balance between taking risk and conservative management.”
In November 2022, the then-96-year-old Lewis was guest of honour at the 125th anniversary dinner of The Twenty Club, the social club for senior retail executives. The event was a sell-out and despite being slightly frail and relying on hearing aids, Mr Bernard proved he was still as well-informed as ever with typically pithy and direct comments about the state of the industry.
In 2005 Drapers presented Bernard Lewis, who was then 79, with a lifetime achievement award. In a rare interview, he explained why he had kept a low profile for so long: “It’s difficult now for people to realise how hot we were once we found our successful formula in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We were growing so fast there was a rumour we had won the football pools! We deliberately stayed an unlimited liability company until the mid-1960s. People didn’t know how good we were, but we did and we had no intention of telling them how we did it. We were the only game in town.”
The death of Bernard Lewis draws a line under what some will always regard as a golden era of fashion retailing in the UK before ecommerce changed the rules of the game.
Bernard Lewis: 10 February 1926 - 28 February 2026.
Main image: Bernard Lewis speaks at The Twenty Club in 2022, courtesy of Eric Musgrave.
