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Now, with a renaissance of British luxury underway -- thanks to a crop of new talents and booming new demand for high-end goods from Chinese and Russian consumers -- this manufacturing gap is gaining attention.

"SELLING YOUR SOUL"

Pierre Mallevays, a former LVMH executive and now managing partner of Savigny Partners LLP, a corporate finance and M&A boutique specializing in luxury goods, said British luxury's renaissance may have come just in time.

"British brands simply cannot emulate the French and Italians -- they need to reach back and find their history, but in many cases that history in no longer there," he said in an interview.

"Where the British were very good traditionally was in their own production and their own manufacturing. Once you start dismantling that by selling factories you sell your soul."

Of course, Britain is not alone in shifting manufacturing offshore.

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In the past 40 years, British factories owned by some of the oldest brand names from Burberry to Barbour have closed down and shifted some of their manufacturing to cheaper places such as China and Eastern Europe.

Burberry has kept two factories in Britain, in Yorkshire, but shut one in Wales last year because it was too expensive.

In Manchester -- once the locus of global coat making -- one of Britain's last surviving premium outerwear manufacturers offers a snapshot of British manufacturing's decline.

Cooper & Stollbrand employs 60 workers today, stitching and cutting trench coats, overcoats and bomber jackets often in signature hunting-and-shooting fabrics such as tweed and gabardine.

Their number has fallen from 200 in 1995 and 450 in 1971, a year sterling strengthened sharply against the dollar, increasing costs for British exporters and marking the start of retailers' exit to cheaper sites.

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A decades-long decline in British manufacturing is back in the limelight with the launch of government-funded research to find out if, despite acclaim, young designers like Marios Schwab are at a terminal disadvantage to French and Italian rivals because they don't have a factory on their doorstep.

So far one problem is clear: however hot the designer talent, it is impossible to get ahead if you can't get your clothes made.

"British designers are not progressing season-on-season because of the manufacturing," said Wendy Malem, director for not-for-profit Centre for Fashion Enterprise, who is leading the 100,000 pound government-sponsored project.

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"They cannot overcome the manufacturing glass ceiling."