London – Bethany Williams' Women of Change collection was produced in collaboration with female prisoners.
The menswear designer, whose work explores social and environmental change, worked with female prisoners and San Patrignano, a drugs and alcohol rehabilitation community in Italy that teaches recovering addicts traditional craft skills such as weaving and leatherwork, to produce pieces for her spring/summer 2018 collection.
The pieces are made using recycled packaging materials sourced from the workshops at San Patrignano. The Attentionze tape, which appears as a repeated motif across the collection, was taken from the electrical department.
‘The collection provides a positive critique of gender by men supporting women through the purchase of the garments,’ Williams explains to LS:N Global.
The campaign lookbook is a collaboration between the designer and TIH Models, an agency that supports young homeless people in London, and features models Kris McAllister and Mustapha, who are both homeless.
The Big Picture
- Williams’ work addresses real social issues such as homelessness that are not typically explored by fashion designers. Read about her collaboration with Tesco and the Vauxhall Foodbank here
- Designed to support some of society’s most vulnerable women, the menswear collection addresses the gender zeitgeist from a fresh perspective