A Rebel with a Cause: Why William Morris was the original design disruptor
William Morris, that brooding Victorian rebel who railed against what good design meant. Morris & Co. declares his principles of craft as more important than ever.
The busy factory floor. Fast moving hands, applying experimental pigments. Scissors snipping threads. Dust and dyer’s woad. Headline making political lectures. The brilliant, brooding Victorian, William Morris, was hardly twee.
Today, 160 years since its founding, Morris & Co. reasserts its identity as the original design rebel. Not as a retreat into nostalgia but claiming that its founder’s principles has never been more important.
Amidst tapping for likes, and frictionless scrolling videos, between the bewildering booms, pops and bursts of various technological bubbles, Morris & Co.’s designs make us believe in the importance of a well-crafted object more than ever.
Every collection at Morris & Co. begins in the studio, hand-painted and sketched by our designers. Many pairs of hands, pencils, drafting. Erasing. Starting again. Once designs are complete, the works are pushed through the pinch of the rollers at our historic British factories, where generations of manufacturing expertise transform raw materials into works of art.
Morris & Co. was founded on Morris’ belief that “art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour”, where workers engaged directly with the creative process from beginning to end, resulting in a beautiful product. We want to assert the firm’s beliefs once more.
Morris & Co. designs aren’t amorphous floating pixels to be exchanged only as photographs on a screen. They’re to be pasted as thick, heavy gsm wallpaper on the wall, warped into cushions, pleated into curtains. They’re the blossoming branches of Blackthorn. They’re the tulips in spiralling and latticing with the small, low growing flowers of Pimpernel, or the wild daffodils of Lent Lily.
At the heart of Morris & Co. is a challenge to a modern culture that has lost meaning and human touch: one that prioritises safe, disembodying, and desensitising, automated choices over authentic, audacious self-expression. Craft is not merely the production of a physical object; it is an act of thinking and making with your mind and body.
Morris & Co. encourages a global audience to see interior decoration not as a wallflower, but rather as, in Morris’ own words, “the most important production of art”. The purpose of craft is not simply aesthetic; it is an intentional way of connecting with the world and the stories that shape it.
