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For London’s fashion-aware in 1970, South Molton Street was just a shortcut through dull Mayfair from Selfridges in Oxford Street to the Fenwick store in Bond Street. And then Joan Burstein, with her husband, Sidney, acquired No 27, an 18th-century row house, from Sir William Pigott-Brown, and kept his name for their clothes store. Over the next 50 years, much of South Molton Street became the empire of Browns.

The Bursteins pioneered an approach to retail that we would now call “curation”. Designers in other countries were already producing prêt-à-porter, and gifted young British talents were making experimental collections, so there was excellent potential stock.

The problem for creators was outlets. Sonia Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé and other early ready-to-wear designers did not as yet have their own shops in every capital city in the world, and were not imported to London. While small, ephemeral, London fashion boutiques featured their founder’s products, plus maybe the work of friends, it was a long trudge to visit them all.

Burstein, who has died aged 100, selected clothes and accessories for Browns as a modern stylist would for clients: her taste was creative in itself and she chose on first-reaction gut instinct a wide range of imaginative creations to offer to top-end spenders.

Her regular customers knew she would always have or could get what they did not yet know they wanted, from a T-shirt to le tout ensemble, while poorer fashion fans made a South Molton Street detour to see Vogue-shot clothes for real in the windows, and sometimes touch them inside – her staff were not Mayfair snooty nor working on commission. Browns served as a museum of current fashion where you could study details close up. Burstein once had a crazy sale where everything was 25 quid, to give herself as much as buyers a pleasurable shock.

Burstein went everywhere to source not by names, labels or brands, but in pursuit of interesting garments: to London fashion student degree shows (John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan); Europe (Rykiel, Missoni, Armani, Jil Sander, Alber Elbaz, whom she reminded regularly to add sleeves to his dresses for the older woman such as herself); to Japan when its designers were considered eccentric novelties (Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake); and the US.

She hunted Calvin Klein down on the dancefloor in Manhattan’s Studio 54 to propose a deal, charmed Donna Karan, and set Ralph Lauren up in a former chemist’s shop in Bond Street, giving him access to the London he had always admired.

Staff members, including Paul Smith, went on to fashion careers. The shop on the ground floor at 27 spread over the building and annexed adjacent premises, 26, 25, 23 and more, including a hair salon, Molton Brown, which developed its own line of products.

All this was the more impressive because Browns was Burstein’s midlife venture, rebuilding a business that had crashed, leaving her family broke. Born in Camden, north London, she was the daughter of a chiropodist, Ashley Jotner, and tailor, Mary (nee Pleeth), and a branch on a tree of East End clothing workers including two dressmaker aunts.

She trained as a pharmacist and was working as such when she met Sidney Burstein, who had once sold black market nylon stockings, and was working on his family’s street stall. They married in 1946. He then flogged undies from a stall in Ridley Road, Hackney, and she joined him. Do not imagine her in a trader’s coverall. Her aunts sewed her good copies of Dior New Look outfits.

They managed to save a deposit for a proper shop, the first in what in the 1960s developed into the smart mini-chain Neatawear, 35 branches in the West End, Kensington, and in other cities. They grew the business by borrowing until it was over-extended in the mid-60s, bankrupting the couple, who lost their home and everything in it, and, with their children, Simon and Caroline, were housed by friends.

Sidney’s brother invited him into a small shop off the Edgware Road; Joan took it on, made a go of it, and in 1969 discovered an empty space in Kensington High Street, called it Feathers, and for lack of funds décor’ed it with bamboo and junk furniture. The atmosphere was like a club for Beautiful People doing the frug, and the clever stock choices, like the otherwise unobtainable Newman jeans with a young Manolo Blahnik as salesman, were made by Mrs B, as she was known in fashion thereafter.

At 40 she knew how to dress and to make assured but not bossy suggestions to others. Feathers did an astonishing £5,000 of business on its first day. But when Simon came home from his Saturday job in South Molton Street reporting that the backwater locale showed promise, his father determined to move there. Burstein followed reluctantly, but it proved the right place, with a higher income stratum than Kensington High.

This was not yet a world of well-advertised luxury brands promoting looks mostly to be photographed on red carpets: Burstein’s customers were prospecting for distinctive clothes, often daywear for hard usage – Browns prices were steep, but they bought quality that could be felt in the hand as well as seen by the lens.

Burstein much later adjusted to the new world of online shopping (Browns early added e-retail) but could never understand why anyone would deny themselves the thrill of shopping in and for the flesh.

Technically, she retired at 90, after the online company Farfetch bought Browns in 2015, although she kept the title of honorary chairman, and, wearing a mix of new and vintage pieces and her Ferragamo Audrey shoes, she would pop into her old realm. What was in effect a Browns mini-department store opened in Brook Street in 2021. Burstein was appointed CBE in 2006.

Sidney died in 2010. Simon and Caroline, and some of her seven grandchildren, all worked for the Browns empire. Her children and grandchildren survive her.

• Joan Burstein, fashion retailer, born 21 February 1926; died 17 April 2026