Celebrating 150 years of Liberty’s DNA – fusing design, nature and art
The world-famous Liberty department store in London celebrated its 150th anniversary this year. Describing itself as “an extraordinary laboratory of creativity, generating inventions, innovations, and original expressions of form and thought”, 2025 has seen a year-long programme of exhibitions, installations and special collections.
An exhibition entitled I am. We are. Liberty., located in the east gallery on the fourth floor of the London store, was a rare view into the Liberty archive. Showcasing 330 different print designs from the late 1800s right up until the Liberty Retold fabric collection for Spring/Summer 25.
The exhibition was curated by Ester Coen and co-curated by Silvia Spagnol, with all the designs originating from the company archives. Designed as a travelling exhibition, I am. We are. Liberty. was transported to the UK pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan,, in August, in honour of the brand’s early influences.
At the same time, a giant installation, an enormous patchwork house by The Patchwork Collective represented the brand’s living history via a community project that invited artisans, makers and designers from around the world to help create a collaborative artwork.
This physical manifestation of craft and creativity was made from more than 1,000 patchwork squares and occupied the store’s central atrium. Contributors could trace their own patch via a map which details the exact location of all 1,000 patches, paying tribute to its customers and collaborators as co-creators of the Liberty brand.
Extravagant, exotic, unusual
Founded by Arthur Liberty in 1875, the original store on Regent Street established itself as a destination at the forefront of the aesthetic movement, specialising in imported goods and fabrics. Within the same year as opening, the founder printed the first Liberty fabrics.
This late-19th century movement championed pure beauty and “art for art’s sake” (an expression coined by the 19th-century French philosopher Victor Cousin), pushing back against the moralistic materialism of Victorian England, after the Great Exhibition of 1851. With connections to influential artists and designers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Whistler, the ideals of aestheticism were commercialised by Liberty.
Liberty introduced its customers to a vast array of extravagant objects and textiles imported from the Middle East and Japan, recognising the appetite for unusual and exotic textile prints registered “Art Fabrics” as a trademark. In 1887 the iconic Liberty design Hera was created, featuring stylised peacock feathers, and by the 1890s Liberty Fabrics was a byword for the very best in avant-garde textile design.
Archiving has been part of the Liberty design practice since the 1880s. Today the archive, which is not open to the public, is home to original print designs, pattern books, paintings, drawings and artefacts. It’s an ever-growing resource. Archivist Anna Buruma has said that “Liberty has always used their archive, so prints kept being reworked – making the counting game very difficult”.
Other British heritage brands which also make good use of their archives include Clarks Shoes (The Alfred Gillett Trust), Marks and Spencer and John Lewis & Partners. These rich resources provide inspiration for designers and celebrate the role these well-loved brands have played in customers’ lives across centuries. And when they open to the public they can become important experiential and cultural destinations, such at the Shoemakers Museum, which opened in September in Somerset.
The reason for the enduring appeal of Liberty prints is their “DNA”, which the company has described as “Design, Nature and Art”. The exhibition curators invite us to consider how this continuous cycle of self-renewal works:
Liberty continually regenerates itself, remaining true to its DNA through a cyclical journey that returns to its origins and archetypes. This process allows itself to stay relevant weaving past, present and future into a single living thread in perpetual motion.
Liberty has always represented the zeitgeist, the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era. Its prints worn by the Beatles, Twiggy and David Bowie. It was a fabric supplier to fashion brands Yves Saint Laurent and Cacharel. More recently, Liberty has collaborated with Hermes, Gucci, Acne Studios and Uniqlo, positioning the brand at the forefront of craft and culture.
The choice of the founder to call the store his own name was symbolic. Department stores were new businesses at the time which provided alternative means of employment for women, enabling a newfound freedom. They were the innovative emporiums mirroring societal change where women were powerful actors and agents of change as consumers, designers, workers, managers and eventually owners.
This year’s programme of events at Liberty has leveraged storytelling and sensory marketing to create immersive experiences in retail. These interactive and shareable environments help increase customer dwell times and enhance advocacy of the brand.
This rich crossover point, where retail and leisure merge, offering sensory experiences that go beyond transactions, fostering community, culture and meaning.
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Tamsin McLaren does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.