Louise Bennetts

Louise Bennetts is a designer, researcher, maker and lecturer specialising in research and development surrounding future fashion and textile systems and sustainable innovation. She is interested in new fashion systems that challenge the current landscape both from a material and manufacturing perspective, as well as social and political.

Louise has designed clothing and textiles in-house for various UK designers, including Roksanda (2014-2016) and Faye and Erica Toogood, with whom she’s worked consistently since 2016. She has an intimate understanding of a rich variety of design and manufacture techniques, from hand-made to industrial, as well as the intricate internal operations of the fashion design and manufacture industry. Concurrently to her fashion design practice, she has worked on costume design for contemporary dance productions, including Hofesh Shechter’s 2018 East Wall, a production performed in the moat of the Tower of London, combining professional and local community dancers into a combined cast of over 120. Currently, her focus is on sustainable material developments, including working on speculative projects with bio-designers, and leading material innovation for textile waste reuse design agency ReWeave since 2021. In 2022, she worked extensively developing materials and working methodology for the creation of Cecilia Vicuña’s large-scale Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern. Louise worked on the BioDesign and Future Fashion Systems platforms of the Royal College of Art MA Fashion course between 2015 and 2022, and has guest lectured at several universities in the UK and Ireland. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2014) and Edinburgh College of Art (2012), and currently lives and works from Edinburgh, UK.