After a chronic illness forced Bethany Williams to step away from fashion in 2022, the designer felt apprehensive about returning to the industry. But when Toast approached the designer about working on a collaboration earlier this year, it felt like the right project for her to dip her toe back in the water.
“I was a bit scared at first,” the designer tells Vogue. “But [the project] is slower, and working with waste, so I just felt secure in it.” It helped, too, that her friend and fellow designer Phoebe English – with whom she launched the Emergency Designer Network during the pandemic, along with Holly Fulton – had already partnered with the high-street retailer on an upcycled capsule of one-off pieces back in 2024. “It’s really interesting to just do unique pieces, rather than something larger. That felt really special.”
In many ways, the resulting 16-piece collection is Williams’s most personal one to date. Centred around the theme of “The Light We Carry”, it explores some of the ideas that featured in the designer’s debut art exhibition at the Bethlem Gallery last year, including her recovery from her illness. “I was looking at light: how light exists within all of us, and how we rediscover that for ourselves,” she explains, noting how she was also reflecting on ideas of lineage as part of that.
Having grown up on the Isle of Man (and returned there during her convalescence), Williams wanted to bring to life certain traditions through the collection, working with weaver John Dog Callister to create a bag inspired by bumbee cages – which in Manx folklore, are used to catch “naughty fairies” – out of foraged willow. For the first time, Williams’s own paintings, inspired by the Manx landscape and her own family history, were turned into the distinctive patterns that feature throughout the collection.
“I wanted to use my own hands for the project,” the designer says, explaining how painting helped her regain confidence during her recovery. The fact that she’s created all the artwork herself makes the collection feel more “authentic”, she explains. One painting features Williams, her mother and her great-grandmother holding each other’s shoulders – a symbol of how “love and care is transferred over generations”, while another features the fishing boats that her family used to work on during the 1800s.
For Williams, reestablishing her relationships with long-term collaborators was another crucial part of the project. To translate her paintings into the collection’s patchwork knits, the designer worked with specialist Alice Morell Evans, who crocheted together pieces from old Toast samples and other pre-existing garments. Williams also partnered with Making for Change – an initiative established by the London College of Fashion and Ministry of Justice to help female ex-offenders find employment – to stitch together the cut-and-spliced skirts, shirts, trousers and coats in the collection, created using non-repairable items that had been returned to Toast by customers.
For the silk pieces, Williams worked with screen-printing expert Holly Ramjaun to overdye the eclectic array of pre-owned scarves that the designer discovered in the Toast warehouse, which they then printed over. “I loved the idea [that] when you upcycle, the garments have hidden histories,” the designer says. “The histories are the prints underneath; from afar it looks like something new, but when you get up close you realise it’s upcycled.”
Amid a sea of high-street collaborations, Williams’s Toast collaboration stands out for both its sustainability credentials and authenticity – with the project being a natural extension of the retailer’s Circle initiatives, which include Reworn (its resale programme) and Renewed (its repair service). “Bethany’s somebody who’s got real integrity when it comes to her creativity and what she produces,” Laura Shippey, Toast’s creative director, reflects. “We thought she would be an amazing partner to work with, as a way to really showcase what is possible with reworking existing clothing that’s come to the end of its life in its current form.”
Following several years away, Williams’s return to fashion is a welcome one – both for her, and the industry at large. As for what’s next? “I’m just going to go slow, and see where I take it,” she says.
Toast Renewed By Bethany Williams, priced from £350, launches online on 15 October on the Toast website.