BETHANY WILLIAMS

Bethany Williams built her label around social and environmental change rather than treating it as an add-on. Her collections combine recycled and sourced materials, including textiles from San Patrignano, and she works directly with grassroots organisations such as The Magpie Project. That fusion of craft and conscience is exactly why she is held up as a leader in sustainable fashion.

Very much so. Williams founded her eponymous sustainable label in 2017 and has repeatedly tied collections to real causes, naming her AW19 collection Adelaide House after a Liverpool women's shelter and collaborating with charities and community projects across her work. The clothes carry stories of overlooked communities, so the social purpose is inseparable from the design.

Her work is rooted in transforming waste into something desirable. She combines recycled and sourced material, including textiles from San Patrignano, and has woven elements like newspaper into garments, as she did for Adelaide House. Expect reclaimed and repurposed materials handled with real craft rather than conventional new fabric.

Bethany Ellen Williams, born 14 December 1989, is a British fashion designer and artist. She was born to Scouse parents near Liverpool and grew up on the Isle of Man, where her mother worked as a pattern cutter at a Liverpool factory. That hands-on, making-led background runs right through her label.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art Critical Practice from the University of Brighton in 2012, then completed a Master of Arts in Menswear at the London College of Fashion. Her final graduating collection was titled Breadline, an early signal of the social themes that would define her work. The fine-art grounding shapes her conceptual, story-led approach.

She officially founded her eponymous sustainable fashion label in 2017, after showing her AW16 collection at Vancouver Fashion Week. The label was built on combining recycled and sourced material from the outset. Its first collection, Women of Change, debuted at London Fashion Week in 2018.

She has received a number of major accolades, including the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, three Fashion Awards, and the BFC Vogue Fashion Fund. She won British Emerging Talent in the Menswear category at the 2019 Fashion Awards and the Leaders of Change: Environment Award at both the 2021 and 2022 Fashion Awards. In 2024 she won the Fabric of Life Award for Designer of the Year.

Yes. She was a finalist for the 2019 LVMH Prize, a significant marker of industry recognition for an emerging designer. That same year she also won the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design for her Adelaide House collection. It was a landmark period for the label.

Yes. Her SS19 collection No Address Needed to Join featured in the Sustainable Thinking exhibition at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in Florence, and an exhibition titled Bethany Williams: Alternative Systems, curated by Priya Khanchandani, was held at the Design Museum. That institutional attention reflects how her practice is read as both fashion and social design.

Collaboration is central to how she works. She has partnered with The Magpie Project across several collections, with illustrator Aaron Skipper, artist Giorgia Chiarion, artist Melissa Kitty Jarram, and with Adidas Originals, for whom she and Jarram even sculpted a sofa for the Carnaby Street flagship shop in 2020. These long-standing partnerships are part of the label's social-enterprise model.