“Let’s just say Willow was never intended to be high street,” Willow says. “Never.”
Since then,Willow has reinvented herself as a champion of sustainability with her label,KitX,and close work with the upcycling experimental workroom Future From Waste Lab. Finding herself designing for Witchery,with more than 100 stores spread across Australia and South Africa,was an unexpected departure from the green space and back onto the main road.
It was also a significant step back in time,with Willow having cut her teeth in Witchery’s marketing department before launching her first label in her twenties.
“This opportunity brought me back to my greater purpose,which is to create positive impact through design,” Willow says. “Witchery has a reach that’s much larger than my core customer with KitX,and I was excited to discover that their sustainability team was eager to work with me.”
This is where the hemp comes in,rolled carefully into fabrics that have a significantly lower environmental impact than cotton and make up nearly half of the collection.
“It was an eye-opener for the design team that hemp can have the look and feel of linen but with less of a crush,” Willow says. “As a future textile,its consumption of water is low,it absorbs three times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than your average tree and attracts no insects,eliminating the need for insecticides.”