Jane Davidson: Dedicated followers of fashion

CHARLOTTE MURRAY was three months old when she entered her first perfumed haute-couture atelier. With her mother, Sarah, and grandmother, Jane Davidson, she arrived at Hervé Léger in swaddling clothes – well, Baby Dior actually.

The Davidsons – Sarah now runs the eponymous designer boutique in Edinburgh's Thistle Street, which her mother started 40 years ago this summer in the Grassmarket – were in Paris to buy 'King of Cling' Léger's latest collection of "bandage" dresses.

These are the skin-tight, sexy numbers so beloved of celebrities, ranging from Victoria Beckham, Jemima Khan and Cheryl Cole, and which Sarah will be stocking this autumn, "because they're so stylish, so flattering and so now".

Thirty-five-year-old Sarah, who is married to Edinburgh financier David Murray, knows of what she speaks since she introduced Edinburgh to Diane von Furstenberg, Missoni, Ben de Lisi and Alberta Ferretti, among others. As men first walked on the moon, her mother was putting Edinburgh's fashionistas into Jean Muir, Ossie Clark and Bill Gibb – all the must-have labels of the late 1960s.

Sarah, too, was in a carrycot when her mother was establishing one of the capital's most glamorous fashion shops – decades before the likes of Harvey Nichols came north – which has counted Dame Maggie Smith, novelist Joanna Trollope, actress Joanna Roth (with husband John Hannah), comedian Jenny Eclair, and models Normandie Keith and Lisa B as customers.

The Davidsons are pathologically discreet about the many other famous names who shop with them, as well as the identities of those Scotsmen who rumour has it would buy two of everything – one for the wife, one for the mistress – at their annual Christmas lingerie shows.

Indeed, Sir Tom Farmer, a family friend who shops only for his wife, by the way, always tells Jane (64) that her dress-and-tell book is her pension. However, she and Sarah are adamant women are entitled to discretion when they spend four figures on a designer label, so Behind Clothes Doors will never be written.

"Forty years on," sighs Jane, gazing adoringly at her granddaughter, who is now nine months old and dressed today in a hand-smocked white cotton dress made for her only last week in Sorrento, where the three generations were on a mini-break before launching into the big birthday celebrations for the shop that Vogue has described as "Scotland's best-kept style secret" and which Harper's has voted one of Britain's top 25 boutiques.

When Jane looks back to the day in 1969 when she hopped into her antique-dealer husband Eric Davidson's van and was driven by the odd-job man to London to "shop" for stock, she laughs at the memory. Then a librarian at Corstophine Library and the daughter of a Welsh concert pianist, Dulcie, and Ron Barnes, an English research scientist who moved the family to Falkirk when he joined ICI, Jane's grandparents had owned an old-fashioned haberdashery and draper's shop, Paris Fashions, in Haverford West, so her petite mother gave her a lifelong fascination with clothes

"She was always very ornately dressed, so OTT, the hat with feathers, the shoes, the stocking in dazzling colours. She had a touch of the Barbara Cartlands. I remember I once gave her a beautiful Bill Gibb dress – she immediately changed the buttons and stuck a huge flower on the bodice. Sacrilege!"

Jane dressed in a rather more restrained fashion. Growing up in the swinging Sixties, she would cut out glossy magazine pictures of Jean Shrimpton wearing Mary Quant minis and paste them around her bedroom. "I always wanted to open a boutique, in Edinburgh, selling the sort of clothes I wanted to wear. I loved the clothes of the Sixties – it was my era! So off I went to London to do my research. After we drove round Piccadilly Circus in circles, I finally made it to Jean Muir, Bill Gibb, Ossie Clark, Jean Varon (run by designer John Bates, who created Diana Rigg's op-art clothes for The Avengers] and Janice Wainwright, because I wanted to sell only British designers."

Rather nervously, Jane announced that she planned to open a dress shop and how should she go about it? "They were all lovely to me, especially Jean Muir. Ossie Clark was a bit sniffy, though."

Back home, there was an empty shop next door to Eric's antiques business. He found some wardrobes for her to display the clothes in; she had them dragged in grey paint because she wanted the shop to look like a French salon.

She'd never had so much fun in her life, she recalls, when we meet in the appropriate surroundings of Edinburgh's new Hotel Missoni (the Davidsons have stocked the Italian fashion label for many years).

As soon as the shop opened, she staged a Festival of Fashion show in the August and every top designer put in an appearance, she remembers, showing me old black-and-white photographs to prove it. Immediately, she was dressing every smart woman in Scotland, whose career-girl daughters now shop with her own daughter.

In 1984, she moved to an elegant Georgian town house in Thistle Street and the business now occupies four floors of the building. The shop has mirrored the changes in Scottish society. Forty years ago, she was selling to the woman behind the great man – lawyers, stockbrokers, captains of industry, who would sign the cheques for the wife's new frock.

Sarah rolls her eyes at such quaint customs, for as her mother notes, by the 1980s, they were selling to vibrant young Scotswomen – lawyers, stockbrokers and captains of industry – and they were melting their own plastic. "I've had the most wonderful life in fashion," says Jane, dandling her granddaughter on her knee. But it wasn't always easy. She and Eric divorced when Sarah was eight and her brother, Edward, 12. "It was a struggle as a single parent, especially when the children were young. It wasn't easy for a woman on her own in business in Scotland back then to be taken seriously.

"But I've made some incredible friendships and people have been so supportive," she says, adding that her customers have always been very loyal and caring. When she underwent a couple of bouts of ill health, she was inundated with flowers, cards and good wishes.

A dozen years ago, Jane, who had since happily married her second husband, the retired agronomist Ainslie Hall, began to question where the business was going. "There was a real danger of us slipping into middle-age and becoming a madame shop – you know, outfits with matching hats for the mother of the bride, stuffy German separates – which would have been a disaster after all my hard work," she points out. "But I really felt I'd lost my energy and my pizazz for a while."

Then 25, Sarah, who is a stunningly beautiful 5ft 11in tall minus her usual five-inch heels, decided to come home from Switzerland, where she had been living and working across Europe as a catwalk model. An honours graduate, she'd read philosophy at Glasgow University and must have been the only clothes horse to strut her stuff in Kenzo while thinking about Kierkegaard.

"I had never wanted to work in mum's shop, although I always knew I'd work in fashion, but I really wanted to do PR and marketing," she confesses. She had, after all, grown up with clothes and remembers getting her first Yves St Laurent when she was seven. "But in my teenage years I rebelled – spiky hair, Doc Martens, ripped jeans, the lot; I was also a Goth for a long time."

On her return home, she began helping her mother out in the business – they were joined by the stylist John Davidson (no relation). "John and Mum taught me everything I know," claims Sarah, who brought a breath of fresh air into the business, travelling to London, Paris, Milan and New York in search of youthful new names, bringing exclusive labels such as Chloe by Stella McCartney to Scotland for the first time.

Indeed, Jane says: "Sarah and John gave me back my own sense of fun in clothes. Now, I've really rediscovered my passion for fashion, so I work part-time for Sarah. When she was heavily pregnant, I had to fly off and buy for this season – I was so nervous. It's such a different world from the one I started in, but I think I got it right."

"You did, mum, you did," her daughter reassures her.

When Sarah was still at school – St George's in Edinburgh – Jane was once asked by a teacher what job Sarah wanted to do. "Well, she might go into fashion," she replied. "Surely you would want better for her than that?" sniffed the teacher. "I was a single parent who had paid all the school fees out of fashion and made a huge success of my own business, so I thought that was pretty rich. Although Sarah did say: "Why would I want to go into fashion, mum? You don't have a life."

"I did say that," sighs Sarah, gift-wrapping Charlotte in her long arms. "Well, I think now I do have a life – a wonderful business, a beautiful daughter and a happy marriage. I just don't do Armani from head-to-toe from morning to night any more," she adds, gazing down at her fashionably distressed jeans and crisp white shirt.

"It's mostly smart casual nowadays," she says with a wide smile.