When menswear designer Bethany Williams heard that she was to be honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, a sense of panic must have ensued.

She had just two weeks to organise her first show at London Fashion Week — a showcase that would be attended by everyone from Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edward Enninful to the Duchess of Cornwall. “I burst out crying when they told me,” says the 28-year-old. “It was so amazing.”

Williams pulled it off with aplomb. But this was no ordinary fashion show. Taking to the catwalk on the final day of the capital’s five-day showcase, her show stood alongside productions from big- budget brands including Burberry and Christopher Kane with a collection devised to honour Adelaide House, a women’s shelter for former offenders in Liverpool.

Along with model of the moment Adwoa Aboah, Williams cast a series of homeless individuals (each of whom was paid industry rates) to model her vision before promising to donate 20 per cent of the profits made from the collection to the shelter.

Her approach, which had already caught the eyes of Buckingham Palace, which bestows the Queen Elizabeth II award to designers who recognise “the role the fashion industry plays in society and diplomacy”, has ensured the socially conscious designer’s status as one of British fashion’s most exciting new additions.

Addressing Williams, and a room of industry insiders, the Duchess of Cornwall praised the designer for bringing “ideas and people together, putting change for the good at the heart of her business”.

When we meet four weeks later it’s clear that Williams — who follows in the footsteps of Richard Quinn, who went from jobbing designer to Amal Clooney’s favourite after receiving the prize in 2018 — hasn’t had her feet on the ground since.

In the weeks since the show she has visited Milan, where she took part in an exhibition of sustainability-focused designers, held in partnership with Italian Vogue, and Paris, where she was shortlisted for the prestigious LVMH prize. She also found the time to relocate her studio from Peckham to Canning Town. “What has just happened?” Williams exclaims over an almond-milk flat white in Dalston. “I just feel so overwhelmed.”

Undoubtedly, it’s been a whirlwind for the sustainability aficionado, whose processes have caught the eyes of Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell and Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière.

A fine art graduate of the University of Brighton and alumna of the London College of Fashion, where she completed a masters degree in menswear, Williams set up her own label in 2017 with the aim of creating the unlikely phenomenon of a fashion label that gives back.

Since then she has been quietly making a name for herself with a label that has charity at its core. “I didn’t want to go into fashion, but I always loved textiles and I could never work in an office,” she explains of her unorthodox approach. “You have to be a part of the problem to be a part of the solution.”

Her label, which has been picked up by a host of discerning stockists including Farfetch, Odd92 in New York and Galeries Lafayette in Paris, is the most socially conscious of its generation.

A host of meaningful collaborations with suppliers, which include the female inmates at HM Prison Downview in Sutton — who create the jersey for her collections — and recovering addicts in the San Patrignano commune in Italy, position it in a field all of its own. Williams regularly donates a proportion of profits to charities and organisations including homeless shelters and food banks.

Despite spells drinking the Kool-Aid of London style magazines, it was while volunteering at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Brighton that Williams decided to start her project. She was struck by the disparity in circumstances. “There is a lot of waste in fashion,” she says. “When I started, the budgets you get for shoots — compared to that at the homeless shelter — seemed like worlds apart. I wanted to be able to connect them in some way.”

Her motivation is to address how an ethical label might look in 2019. “When people think about this side of fashion, they think still think of hemp,” she says.

Her clothes are very much a luxury product. They are expensive (prices start at £210 for organic screen-printed T-shirts and go up to £3,500 for recycled hand-woven jackets). “I need to support the communities I work with through my work, so it’s important that people buy it,” she says. Far from the business of fast fashion, Williams is a purveyor of slow appreciation that benefits “people and the planet”.

The aesthetics matter too. Embracing the demand for clothes that are non-gender specific, she is passionate about silhouette.

“The textiles inform the shape of the garment,” she says, noting that the theme of her collections often come from the charity she has chosen to support. “The next stage of my design process is about keeping my authenticity and working out how to grow sustainability. I want to do it in an authentic way.”