Polish émigré Feliks Topolski's patriotic printed scarf design, entitled 'London 1944', with a printed sketch of allied servicemen of all nations and a London bus, was commissioned during the Second World War by Prague-born, Jewish émigré textile designer Zika Ascher, who had set up the Ascher Company with his wife Lida in London in 1942. (The Ascher name appears on the side of the bus.) Topolski signed a two-year contract with Ascher and produced 20 designs a year for the company, many including famous London landmarks, such as Big Ben. Ascher's son Peter recalled that there was a natural affinity between the two émigrés: 'One was a bloody-minded Czech, the other a bloody-minded Pole. Over suppers of boiled beef, creamed sauces and dumplings, cooked by my mother, they would argue in a mixture of Polish, Czech and English'.

Ascher was a pioneer in bringing fine art to the textile industry and directly commissioning artists. In 1946 he contracted 51 leading French and British artists including Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Cecil Beaton and Graham Sutherland to produce silk scarf designs, called 'Artists' Squares'. They were launched at the V&A’s first postwar exhibition, 'Britain Can Make It', in 1946, then exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery (1947 and 1950), with a catalogue foreword by Sacheverell Sitwell.