Women in Print, William Morris Gallery

Posted by Barbara on January 5, 2026 in Black lives matter, Blog, Exhibition, Fashion, feminism, women artists, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

The department store known as Liberty by Regent Street in London has been at the forefront of fashion and homeware for 150 years.  Fabric is at the heart of the company’s success. Characterised by printed silks and cotton in repeated floral patterns, Liberty textiles are found in homes and wardrobes well beyond the shores of the UK.

Women designers have played a key role in this success story, and a visit to the wonderful William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow introduced me to these super creative dames. The current exhibition is called Women in Print.  The exhibition surveys the evolving influence and status of women in textiles over the past 150 years.

The William Morris company has international origins. Initially selling textiles imported from the Middle East and Asia, it expanded into designing, dyeing and printing in Britain.  The British Arts and Crafts Movement was another key source of inspiration; Liberty embraced floral motifs and handicrafts like embroidery.  This ‘feminine’ craft of needlework provided a gateway for women to move from unpaid domestic craft to a professional context.  Liberty set up their art needlework department in 1900, employing women trained at the Royal School of Needlework.

The years after the First World War marked a turning point for women designers, with increasing political, educational and employment opportunities.  By the 1930s, nearly half of Britain’s textile designers were women.  Many of Liberty’s artists were commissioned as freelancers, selling their designs to appear under the Liberty trademark without their names appearing on the finished product. Many remain anonymous beyond the company archives and one of the intentions of this exhibition is to recover as many of these names as possible and to give credit where it is so overwhelmingly due.

The exhibition features work by some of the most well-known women textile designers of the 20th century, including sisters Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, and Lucienne Day.  It showcases their work but also explains how working for Liberty brought these women into the public eye.

Althea McNish is one such example; born in Trinidad, she was amongst the first, if not the first, designer of African-Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition. Her designs injected much-needed colour and life into the post-war fashion and textiles industry from the 1950s onwards. Initially she worked from her bedroom and living room, but the success she achieved by designing for Liberty enabled the family to move to a larger house in South Tottenham where she established a full-size studio.  

Liberty’s very first customers in the Victorian era loved Paisley prints.. Paisley was a distinctively British phenomenon, appropriating Persian block-printed motifs seen on Kashmir scarves, while actually being manufactured in the cotton mills of Paisley in Scotland from the 1830s.  Helen Adams’s designs in the 1990s updated the traditional motifs and brought Paisley back into fashion.

Liberty started retailing clothes made from their printed textiles in the 1930s, and many fashion designers incorporated Liberty fabrics into their designs. These included Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki, the owner and founder of Biba.

The exhibition is both a visual feast and a treasure trove of information.  Some questions remain unanswered: who exactly was ‘Mrs D. Stonely’?  She is credited with many of the designs, but we do not learn much about her. I discovered Jessie King, Hilda Durkin and Colleen Farr amongst others.  The creativity on display is remarkable and stays in the mind long after you leave. It runs until June 21st.