The Duchess of Cornwall Presents the Second Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design to Bethany Williams
Today’s Royal gathering for the second annual presentation of Her Majesty the Queen’s recognition of a young designer began with a minute’s silence to remember Karl Lagerfeld. Before giving the award, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, paid tribute. ”Karl Lagerfeld was such a towering figure in fashion, for so many years,” she said.
The trophy for 2019 went to 29-year-old Bethany Williams, spotlighting her activism as a trailblazer for change. “This industry plays a very large part in our economy and culture,” the Duchess noted after watching Williams’s show. “The Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design goes to a designer with a social and environmental conscience. She brings ideas and people together and puts change for the good at the heart of her business.”
Williams’s show had followed through in putting forward a picture of her thorough-going practice in championing the transformative abilities of fashion to elevate marginalized groups and to demonstrate the value of ethically handmade craft. There was a set of tents at one end of the runway—both a salutory reminder of the growing homeless problem in the U.K., and an emblem of one of the materials she recycles in her clothes. She explained how her upbringing as the daughter of a mother who is a patternmaker and charity worker in a home where everything was reused determined her course in sourcing materials from skills education projects which help give prisoners and addicts a way forward.
“I worked with Adelaide House in Liverpool, which is one of only eight women-only shelters looking after ex-offenders in the country,” she said. Some of the women’s voices were heard on the soundtrack, as pieces illustrated with drawings of the sewers were worn by Adwoa Aboah and a diverse cast of young British social activists. There were coats woven from shredded copies of the Liverpool Echo, the local newspaper, honoring Williams’s sense of pride in the fact that the Northern city “was the first to have social housing.”
Williams’s hope is that the templates for her interventions will be replicated further. One of the most positive beacons she highlights is the Saint Patriano community in Italy. “I do all my textile development from waste products there. It’s a rehab center which puts crafts in 50 sectors at the center of therapy. I worked with female weavers there,” she said. “And it’s proven to have a 72 percent success rate, which is the highest addiction rehabilitation rate in the world. It’s free, not-for-profit and they sell their products.”
As a virtuous circle in action, it made an uplifting end to London fashion week.
