Bethany Williams (Q3881)
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Bethany Williams is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Bethany Williams |
Bethany Williams is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“Through every collection, we work with a growing network of makers, creatives, and local manufacturers,” said Bethany Williams of the inspiration for fall. “This is a thank you to all the hands that touch these garments.” The collection, titled “The Hands That Heal Us,” celebrated all the skilled contributors whose materials, designs, weaving, knitting, printing, and embroidery led to its genesis.Williams again collaborated with the artist Melissa Kitty Jarram on the striking prints that featured throughout. Each illustration tells a story of the brand's partnership with a specific supplier. This season, importance was placed on functionality, yet each piece felt elevated, as there was a focus on tailoring that used a deeper palette. There was also the introduction of sustainable dark indigo raw denim. “We’ve taken a much earthier approach to the colors than usual—whilst still including bursts of bright contrasts—which has been an exciting development,” said Williams. She “worked closely with denim specialists at ROAD Consultancy to build out our foundations using recycled and organic-based raw denim. These pieces include detachable metal shanks, meaning that at the end of the garment's life, the metal ware can easily be removed and recycled.”A brown houndstooth wool suit and coat were some of the sharpest moments. The material was woven on the Isle of Man at the Laxey Woollen Mill, a family-owned business. The collar on the coat included a newly developed woven textile, created in partnership with Mending for Good, a consulting agency that specializes in ethical solutions to wasted and excess stock for luxury brands. “I wanted to recreate a fur collar-like material using deadstock cotton and wool yarns,” said Williams.Alongside the latest collection launch, Williams debuted an exhibition at the Design Museum entitledBethany Williams: Alternative Systems, which showcases the stories behind her collections to date. “It highlights how hard we’ve worked towards creating change, with social and environmental issues at the heart of everything we do,” said the designer. “I’m so thrilled to promote our community through the history of the brand so far.”
25 February 2022
Bethany Williams’s work is one big virtuous circle. She puts the dignity of marginalized families and workers at its center, while acting as a solution creator for dealing with the waste along the supply chains of much bigger companies. The happiness that radiates from her latest look book, All Our Stories, with a film made by Olivia Lifungula, weaves in yet another affirmative circle: the passing on of children’s tales from one generation to the next.Williams continues to work with the Magpie Project in London, whose purpose is to support families who have no legal right to U.K. government funds, to try to make sure that living in such precarious situations doesn’t result in permanent damage to children.The spoken-word poet Eno Mfon, who also narrates the voice-over piece, worked with mothers and children to create storytelling workshops, which in turn became inspiration for Melissa Kitty Jarram’s cheerful primary color prints.Whatever culture that women and children come from, said Williams, “the moral always comes back to kindness and respect for one another. And we were thinking about how the meaning of those stories kind of transcends into our adult lives.” Her dedication to human values and forging connections for good is phenomenal. “This is the first collection we’ve done which is fully socially produced, from the woven pieces and the knits, all the way through to how they’re stitched,” she said. “Right down to the buttons.”Williams’s supply chain stretches from the Making for Change production unit in London, which trains and employs formerly incarcerated women, to social projects in Italy. Some of the fabrics were donated by the Zegna Foundation. She partnered with another, Sezia, which produces organic yarns in Italy, but was still finding itself with a waste problem. “They kind of make lots of sample swatches for all of their clients, which get incinerated,” she said. “So we’ve been working with them, doing this sorting of the swatches into colors and into fiber, and then we’ve been patching that together for the knitwear.”Closer to home, Williams has continued making the line of patchwork blanket coats that proved so popular last season: “We’re sourcing blankets from vintage markets across the U.K.” Twenty percent of the proceeds of wholesaling of the collection will be returned to the Magpie Trust foundation, which Williams has cofounded.Her reaching out to change things extends yet further.
“You know, now that we’ve done it, we’re hoping that other designers will be able to do it too,” she said. “So we’re trying to work out research ways, you know, to try and help other designers also, because we have the knowledge. I’m also sending out this information to everyone on the mentoring program that we’ve been running.” Williams is a tirelessly persuasive change-making storyteller; it’s hard to think of another designer of her age who is making such an impact on so many.
12 June 2021
A flag with the wordsAll Our Childrenis flying from the roof of Somerset House. Made by Bethany Williams, it’s a publicly visible statement about the work she does with the Magpie Project, a London charity that cares for immigrant women and children to whom the state refuses access to benefits or health care. “They repeatedly hear from councils that ‘these are not our children to look after, they are not our responsibility,’” says Williams. “We’re like, No! These are the most vulnerable people in society. So we wanted to reclaim that phrase and raise a flag above London to say these are all our children.”Yesterday, she’d filled a gallery in the grand arts institution to exhibit photographs of families: mothers, babies, and teenagers wearing the latest installment of her partnership with Magpie. “During lockdown, my artist and illustrator friend Melissa Kitty Jaram sent the mothers and children a project, asking if they’d like to draw each other. Then she made their pictures into little prints, which we’ve used in this collection,” explains Williams.Williams indivisibly folds caring for people and the planet into her definition of sustainability in a way that’s as visually uplifting as it is exemplary. Moving along an installation of her clothes, she related how the making of the collaborative mother-and-child collection sprang out of the Mothers and Minis creative play sessions that the charity organizes. “These are made from white vintage bedding that we asked our sorters to find; these knits are patchworked together with crochet from reclaimed sweaters. The canvas jeans are made from bell tents; the corsets are made of fruit packaging waste by Rosie Evans. And oh,” she paused for breath, “the screen printing was done by a female printing company in Peckham.”After everything was made, there was a socially distanced photo shoot by Ruth Ossai at the charity’s HQ, with mothers, infants, and Magpie Trust youth standing against fantasy backdrops. Helen Kirkham, the London trainer remaker, made children’s shoes from upcycled sneakers.Twenty percent of Bethany Williams’s proceeds always goes to the charity. On hand to explain the impact of providing this happy moment of respite for her clients was Magpie’s founder, Jane Williams. “The very phrasehomeless toddlershould never have to be spoken,” she says. “In our one London borough of Newham, there are 2,000 children living with mothers who have no legal recourse to welfare.
It is the same all over London: women living on the very edge, who will have been sex-trafficked, brought to London as domestic slaves or who have fled domestic violence. COVID-19 has made things worse for them, yes, but it’s far down the list of concerns for people coping with their levels of trauma.” In Newham the women are housed in decommissioned office tower blocks on industrial estates or roundabouts. “They’ll be living in one room with no insulation, sometimes with three children, who have nowhere to learn to crawl or walk. Mothers tell us about staying awake holding their children through nights to keep them safe from vermin. This is why we focus on the under-5s,” says Jane Williams. The only provision members of this destitute community receive from the British Home Office is 37 pounds a week. They’re not entitled to access to health services. “When our mothers give birth in a hospital, they are handed a 7,000 pound bill,” she adds.
19 September 2020
What you hear backstage at fashion shows now is a much more rigorous questioning of designers and brands about sustainability and ethics. The most humbling briefing anywhere comes from Bethany Williams, whose business is set up as a social enterprise in its every facet. She works with, among, and on behalf of the most disadvantaged people in British society, and hearing the reality of what she’s doing will come as a jolt.The London borough of Newham is just down the road from her show venue, which was in Brick Lane. “Newham has the largest population of homeless people in the U.K., and the largest number of women and children in temporary accommodation in London,” she said. “The mothers are refugees without documentation, and women fleeing domestic violence.”Williams is working with the Magpie Project, a charity that has supported 400 mothers and 500 children in the past two years. The women’s critical problem, on top of whatever suffering has brought them to his place of homelessness, is that the state bars the mothers from earning, or drawing social security money. Hence, the title of Williams’s show, “No Recourse to Public Funds.”Well, it looked cheerful, her collection, because Williams is not one to signal doom and angst as a theme—and the whole point is that the clothes can sell in order to channel the money back to where it’s most needed. There were colorfully bright appliqués, well tailored wide-leg trousers, and nylon hoodies, shrunken tops, and really great coats—one made of patch-worked plaid blankets with the fringe running down a lapel.Everything is recycled, organic, or handmade, said Williams. To research children’s clothes she’d gone to the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (an poverty-stricken area since Dickensian times, where successive waves of immigrants have survived to build London’s longstanding multicultural communities). The miniature tops-slash-body braces then fell into place. In addition, she’d gone to a British toy factory to ask to reuse their waste; the ribbons linking the tiers of a coat came from there.Those who leaned close to question Williams on her use of nylon were in for a shock—especially if they’ve ever been to a festival and been guilty of leaving a tent behind. “Our studio is full of bell-tents which are reclaimed from glamping,” she smiled. “There are lots of different colors.” That these garments have become the medium to provide shelter for homeless families—the irony wasn’t lost.
6 January 2020