Ashley Williams Pioneered Girlhood Fashion—Now She’s Back to Herald Its Next Era
What do Hello Kitty and Gandalf the Grey have in common? Just ask London’s most spirited designer.
It will be almost impossible to imagine this now: a time when bows did not adorn It Bags, when blush pink was considered a tacky color for adult women to wear, when rosettes and crystals were outré in the luxury fashion space. But when Ashley Williams started her brand in 2014, her version of complex, rebellious, and pretty girldom went very much against the grain.
“I think it was my third fashion show,” Williams recalls of the group shows in London she participated in with the independent brand incubator Fashion East, “and a critic didn’t review my show. She wrote about all the other designers, but wouldn’t even write about mine.” The rationale? “Too girly.” A lot of industry insiders would see Williams’s hot pink striped knits or graphic tees at the time and tell her, “well, we don’t get it,” she remembers.Back in the 2010s, it was the moment of neon-colored peplum tops, peep-toe heels, and chunky gemstone jewelry—all stylistic trends intended to make young women look older, or at least more like small business owners. Williams’s clothes were punkier, cuter, more aggressive. Not everybody got it—but the cool girls certainly did.
“The trashy, moody bad girls of the turn of the millennium loomed large in Ashley Williams’s imagination for Spring, a motley crew of fictional and real-life characters that started with Emily the Strange and ended with Avril Lavigne,” wrote ’s Chioma Nnadi lovingly in her review of Williams’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection.In that era of London, Williams’s brand would have sat beside Luella or Meadham Kirchhoff, two labels that plumbed the impish feminine spirit. Both labels have since shuttered. Williams is still here.
“I’m just happy if I can keep going,” she admits. She’s weathered the fashion storm not only by heaps of industry support—ten years later Fashion East is backing her first fashion show in over three years—but also by knowing when to give herself a break. After taking time off for personal reasons in 2020, Williams rushed back into the thick of London Fashion Week this past September with her delightedly twisted wit.On the catwalk in the basement level of a concrete building, models wore sweaters as hats and carried medieval scepers. Some wore -style hockey masks, others had hair extensions down to their knees. A hoodie that read “I <3 me” zipped up over a model’s face. “I’m feeling really good about everything creatively,” Williams tells me a couple weeks before her show.Fashion, finally, has caught up to her. “Things have been broken down with age-appropriate dressing and gender-appropriate dressing,” Williams says. “Now you don’t need to dress for your age, you don’t need to dress for what gender you are. Whereas, back when I started, fashion was still very binary in that sense. Ten years ago, if you wore a certain thing, it would be seen as, I don’t know, outlandish or risky. But now I feel like it’s pretty standard to push your fashion look.”
Within Williams’s studio, fashion looks are pushed constantly. There are dogs on skirts and images of both Hello Kitty and Galdalf the Grey on her mood board. She describes her disparate references as a “charm bracelet,” where all the charms need not be thematically linked, but can represent different aspects of her personality and interests. “One thing really inspiring this season was I watched 27 hours of lectures on the plague in 1300 in London,” she says, noting she mashed that up with early internet language and graphics and her own love of silly-cute-fun stuff.
The final product is clothes as irreverent as they are irresistible. Snarky, cute, clever, and lively, Williams’s grand return to fashion has potential to usher in a new era after 2023 and 2024’s girlhood moment. What to call it? It’s more like the Mood Board Era—if you love it, it will work with your style. Trust Ashley Williams.
