Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles
At the William Morris Gallery this autumn, the familiar Liberty print is reframed. Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles restores the designers behind the patterns — women whose creativity shaped the fabric of modern British life, yet whose names were often consigned to the margins. Conceived in partnership with Liberty Fabrics to mark the company’s 150th anniversary, the exhibition is both a celebration and an act of recognition.
Wiltshire Berry, designed by D Stoneley for Liberty, 1933, screen-printed Tana Lawn™ cotton, 1970s-1980s. Credit: Liberty Fabrics Archive. (Subscribers to Selvedge will recognise this print, used as the lining to the wrapper for Selvedge Issue 126, Deco!)
Founded in 1875 as an importer of silks and decorative arts from the Middle East and Asia, Liberty quickly began producing its own designs. The house’s floral patterns became entwined with British identity, worn on the high street and in couture, stitched into patchwork and immortalised on scarves. More than 100 works including garments, original drawings, fabrics, photographs and film, are brought together here, tracing Liberty’s evolution while charting the growing role of women in design.
The opening galleries set Liberty’s stage: a BIBA trouser suit in signature cotton, a 1978 wedding dress pieced from seventeen prints, and a contemporary jalabiya designed by current Head of Design Polly Mason and hand-embroidered in the UAE. Each garment illustrates how Liberty has long acted as a bridge between cultures, translating hand-drawn pattern into forms that travel across continents.
Print impression for Phoebus, by Mitzi Cunliffe for Liberty, screen-printed pigment on paper, 1959. Design is copyright © Liberty Fabric Limited [1959].
But the exhibition also looks back to a quieter story: how textiles themselves became established at Liberty. From the late 19th century, the design house was closely tied to the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Inspired by the natural world and so-called “feminine” handicrafts, the Movement provided a gateway for women to move from unpaid domestic embroidery into professional design. Liberty employed figures such as Ann Macbeth, who modernised embroidery at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work, some later adapted for print, signalled a pivotal transition from stitch to surface. Rare loans from Liberty’s archive — including embroidery catalogues and a 1900s pattern book — show how motifs born in the parlour were transformed into patterns for the printing press.
Althea McNish, c. 1961. William Morris Gallery.
Social change also shaped the studio. Around the First World War, new political, educational and employment opportunities allowed women to enter the profession in greater numbers, and by the 1930s nearly half of Britain’s textile designers were women. Yet recognition lagged behind. Many patterns remained unattributed, their authors reduced to initials. Women in Print seeks to restore those identities, focusing on five key designers: Jessie M. King, Lucienne Day, Althea McNish, Madeleine Lawrence, and the enigmatic Mrs Stonely. Day’s crisp modernism and McNish’s radiant colour are well known, but Stonely — identifiable only by her initials “D.S.” — remains largely invisible, despite her prints still being produced today.
Printed cotton suit in Liberty fabric, Mary Quant for Ginger Group, c. 1965. Credit: Liberty/William Morris Gallery.
Other sections celebrate the Liberty scarf as a canvas for innovation, the bold language of Collier Campbell in the 1970s, and the studio’s embrace of digital tools today. A new film intercuts archival fragments with interviews from Sarah Campbell, Natalie Gibson, Neisha Crosland and Polly Mason, stitching past into present and asking, poignantly, what the next generation of women in print might look like. This exhibition does more than recount history — it invites us to look again at the textiles we know so well, to see not just pattern but presence. Behind every motif is a maker; behind every print, a woman’s story waiting to be read.
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Further information:
Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles opens on Saturday 18 October 2025, and is on show until Sunday 21 June 2026, at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London.
Read more about Liberty prints in the following book: Liberty: Design. Pattern. Colour, Kassia St Clair. Available now in the Selvedge book shop.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Design for Quickstep, renamed Kazak, by Collier Campbell for Liberty, c. 1970. © Sarah Campbell.
All other images as credited in photo captions.