Roofless

>> I’m currently blogging up the new season offerings from London Collections Menswear on Opening Ceremony’s blog and have much to say on all of the delights LC:M has to offer but with the positive response to my Half-Arsed Ethics post featuring my conversation with Orsola de Castro, I thought I’d revisit designer Bethany Williams and her label Roofless, who I had starred in my Inbox for precisely a year.  Can you see a pattern emerging from my posting malaise?  But hurrah!  Williams’ work isn’t exactly seasonal.  Whilst Williams was in her final year at Brighton University, she started volunteering at her local soup kitchen and then came up with the idea of using fashion and art to raise awareness and so started up Roofless.  Forget the usual dull charity meets fashion affairs where “All proceeds of this boring t-shirt goes to x charity…”.  Instead Roofless seeks to create real links between a garment and a person in need by using relational art.  With the first collection, Williams established a cycle of exchange, where three warm and second-hand items of clothing were exchanged with one belonging to the homeless, who she met whilst volunteering at the soup kitchen.  She then took these items and added second skins so to speak to alter them and make them reversible, often using materials from hardware stores – insulation or protective materials that indicate the need for shelter.  The intended wearer is therefore constantly reminded of that need.  With the labels that tell of stories and anecdotes that Williams gathered firsthand, she imbues these upcycled clothes with the essence and character of its previous owner, however harrowing they may be.  Statements like “He shoots up every night to keep warm” certainly doesn’t sugarcoat or mask the issue at hand.  Although this was a theoretical project at the time of conception, the intention is for all profits to go towards the relevant charities and communities.

“By using our social capital, intellectual and labour intense skills we aim to give back and to create a profit which will be given to connected charities, continuing the cycle. ROOFLESS  strives to alter and question the complex system of fashion and believes the critical power of art can be used to achieve this.”

Through the latest collection ‘A New Life’ ROOFLESS explores, engages and embodies the social space of Wood Street. Working along side Public Works and Megan Dow, as part of a project involving 24 artists who have each been given a shop on Wood Street to reinvent, ROOFLESS use the window of the New Life Charity Shop’ as an art residency. By creating and sourcing in the New Life Charity Shop, we hope the collection has been influenced by the stories we have over heard and the history that we have learnt during our time in Wood Street. For the shoot we have collaborated with Wood Street, using street casted, local models mixed with two male models. Gemma and Hannah are sisters from Wood Street.

After graduating, Williams developed Roofless further as she delved into the social space of Wood Street in Walthamstow.  This time, the purpose wasn’t to address homelessness but the need to retain local community and character, especially in a city like London, where localised quirk is fast diminishing because of rapid property development and foreign wealth.  Working with architecture/art practise Public Works and print and pattern designers Megan Dow and Hanna Sager Forsberg, together they took over an empty shop on Wood Street to create a charity shop called A New Life back in May.  From the items that were donated to the shop, Williams and co. then created a collection based on the history, the community and the conversations centred around Wood Street.  In this part of the East End (the “proper” bit of East – not fashionable Dalston/London Fields), Williams would encounter characters like a man, obsessed with collecting all things horse related.  And so horses are featured in the prints on the garments.  Photos of local council blocks are also incorporated as well as physically donated textile items.  It certainly  a new thought provoking slant on to the established idea of upcycling.

Here is the resulting photo shoot featuring the clothing created and sourced from A New Life, shot on location on Wood Street, using locally street cast models.

Williams’ cause and project is aided vastly by the fact that aesthetics haven’t gone out of the window.  Her work has already been shot in editorials for the likes of Garage, Pop and LOVE magazine as beyond a compelling background story and admirable motive, she’s creating visually stimulating pieces of clothing.  Her first collection where garments have been lined with materials such as insulation tape and floor insulation in particular catches the eye with its symbolic juxtaposition of what we would deem “necessary”.  These materials might be considered unconventional in the context of clothing but in reality are the vital components of shelter – a basic need and I believe, a right, for everyone.