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.
The way the fashion supply chain treats workers is another aspect of current conversation, and there was another humbling reply from Williams on that, too. “We use a factory in North London, and we work with women ex-offenders and those on prison day-release.” That project, training women in collaboration with the London College of Fashion is called Making for Change. “I’m just about to move my studio into the same space as them,” Williams nodded. “I’m really excited.”
Feeling good about buying clothes obviously takes on a whole different set of meanings when the label inside is Bethany Williams, and the labor and materials embody constructive practices all along the line. “I feel what’s important about fashion is that it has this ability to amplify ideas; to educate people about things that are going on in this country which need to be solved,” Williams said.
She left attendees with another very practical idea, moving in its simplicity, and again revealing of a terrible level of need. “Socks are one of the things which are least-donated and most in demand for homeless people. So, we designed Wool and the Gang x Magpie Trust sock patterns, in adult and child sizes, which people can download to knit and send in for the mothers and children.”
Will fashion people take up this thread? Whether we can knit or not isn’t the point. Williams is a very busy young woman, but her practices, knowledge, and experience also qualify her as an educator. She is exactly the kind of consultant who larger companies should be paying to show them how to get things working in their own local patches. What she represents is an epiphany: that uber-corporate pledges and donations to causes that are far away and out of sight are all fine, but the means for taking action to create visible, tangible, change probably lies within a couple of miles radius of our own offices.
