Dust and dyer's woad hang in the air. Scissors move fast through cotton and silk. Somewhere in the same decade, a man best known for wallpaper is on a stage giving a political lecture that will unsettle half the room. William Morris was never the twee, floral-print figure his reputation sometimes suggests. He was a working rebel, and Morris & Co. wants you to remember that, 160 years after he founded the company.
Historic archive samples from the William Morris Collection.
This is the premise behind Rebellious by Design, the brand's new campaign, launched by Morris & Co.'s parent business, Sanderson Design Group. It is not a nostalgic retreat into heritage marketing. It is a claim that Morris's founding principles matter more now than they did in 1861, precisely because the culture around us has changed so completely. Between the tap of a like button and the frictionless scroll of another video, amid the constant booms and busts of one technological bubble after another, Morris & Co. is arguing for the value of an object someone actually made.
An artist at work on contemporary Morris & Co. designs.
A studio scene for the new Morris & Co. campaign: 'The Original Design Rebel'.
That argument starts in the studio, where every collection still begins as a drawing. Hands, pencils, drafting, rubbing out, starting again. Only once a design is finished does it travel to one of the company's historic British factories, where it passes through the rollers and generations of manufacturing knowledge turn pigment and paper into pattern. Morris believed that art was, in his words, "the expression of man's pleasure in labour," and that a worker should stay involved in a design from its first sketch to its finished form. That belief is the throughline the new campaign wants to reassert, and it shapes how the company still talks about its own process today...
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Image Credits:
All further images courtesy of Sanderson Design Group.