Designer and activist Katharine Hamnett on fast fashion, the planet and photobombing Thatcher

I have lost Katharine Hamnett in the Oxfam store. We met briefly, a quick ‘hello’, but now she is wandering around her local charity shop in Dalston, East London, on the hunt for items to take home. Her dog Arthur traipses loyally behind her.

The fashion designer renowned for her punchy and political slogan tees is ecstatic when I track her down. She has discovered a large woven blanket, perfect for the picnic she is planning for her 77th birthday.

Oxfam is as excited to have her as she is about her picnic blanket. Mannequins wear white t-shirts with one of Hamnett’s signature slogans, crying out in bold black letters: ‘NO MORE FASHION VICTIMS.’

As we sit down to chat in the underbelly of the Oxfam store, Hamnett explains: “The environment is the fashion victim. The planet is the fashion victim. There are people out there making money out of slave labour and exploitative practices.”

The designer is teaming up with Oxfam for its Second Hand September campaign, encouraging people to buy second hand clothes and protect the planet. 

‘No More Fashion Victims’ will be printed on 100 second hand t-shirts and sold in Oxfams in September, and they will be modelled in the charity’s runway show in London Fashion Week.

It is a good fit. Hamnett clearly loves second hand. She is like a magpie enticed by shiny things as she scans her eyes around this dark room where things are sorted and stored before being put on display upstairs to find them a new home.

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And Hamnett was among the first to blow the whistle on the industry’s environmental impact. In the late 80s, she initiated research into how the industry was harming people and the planet, “thinking the results would be fine, and of course it came back a nightmare.”

“Tens of farmers dying of accidental pesticide poisoning each year,” she says. “Millions of people enslaved in these conditions. Almost every single material process having a negative impact on the environment.”

In 2003, Hamnett visited Mali with Oxfam to expose the plight of the cotton farmers. “They were starving. I met farmers’ wives who had lost two children at the breast because they couldn’t make enough milk,” she recalls.

She said as much to the prime minister of Mali: “How can you let your citizens live in conditions worse than slavery?” Security guards jumped up like giants.

Hamnett has fought to change the industry from the inside. “It’s a bit of a failure, really,” she admits. “I thought when I found this out, I could say: ‘Oh my God. This is happening. We’ve got to fix it immediately.’ It hasn’t been like that at all. There’s been lying and greenwashing.

“I’ve had manufacturers say: ‘If you carry on with this ethical and environmental shit, you can take your collection elsewhere.’ I realised I picked the wrong job, but I didn’t realise how obdurate, enormous or ubiquitous the clothing industry is. It doesn’t want to change, because it’s making money out of exploitative practices.”

Hamnett isn’t afraid of rebellion. She has always been a bit of a “black sheep”, first when her family moved to France when she was five and then when she went to a “miserable” prep school in the English countryside where she spoke better French than her teachers.

Her father was an RAF man who became a defence attaché in MI6 and her mother was a socialite. Hamnett dreamt of being a filmmaker or an archaeologist, but she settled for fashion because it was the route which least insulted her parents – until she returned from Central Saint Martins art school a socialist and a pacifist. 

Hamnett’s background served her well when she went to a cocktail party with Margaret Thatcher. She is tickled as she remembers Jasper Conran telling her: “Why would you share a glass of warm white wine with that murderess?” 

But this was a photo opportunity. She knocked up a t-shirt that afternoon with the anti-nuclear-missile message, ‘58% Don’t Want Perishing’, and hid it until it was time for the photo. Thatcher apparently squawked like a chicken. It is one of her most famous designs.

“Anger is hell, so I try to live by that. There’s a moment as it’s rising, you can surf it into creative energy that you can use,” Hamnett says. 

She’s angry with politicians now too. Hamnett recently binned her CBE because of MPs’ failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and her distaste for Keir Starmer is no secret. If she was to put a slogan on a tee to call out the prime minister, it would be: ‘Ceasefire and Get Out.’

“I think it’s time to actually stir it the fuck up. I think it’s the independents. Jeremy [Corbyn] is great. We need to be looking at the next election and having independents ready to stand,” Hamnett says.

Anger might fuel Hamnett’s work, but I point out that love seems to play a part too. Her first slogan campaign ‘Choose Life’ from 1983 was inspired by the central Buddhist tenet to do no harm – to live a good, meaningful life and change the world for the better.

It is most famous for being worn by pop duo Wham! and had an anti-suicide and anti-drugs message before it was adopted by campaigners to bring light during the AIDS epidemic.

This later inspired her ‘Choose Love’ t-shirt with charity Help Refugees to raise money for refugees and asylum seekers, and the charity has since rebranded as Choose Love. It is probably what Hamnett is most proud of in career.

“Choose Love is wonderful,” she says. “I think that was the best one I ever did. It was kind of a note to self, because there are such tendencies to ‘choose murder’ or ‘choose strangle’ but I do need to be constantly reminded. It’s really fantastic. It’s the philosophical position you need to start at. It’s the only way forward.”

There is love in every item of clothing Hamnett designs. She imagines she is creating a garment for herself or her best friend, to “bring out their natural beauty”, and she uses the best quality sustainable fabric. It is “designed to be fashion that works forever”.

“Good quality costs so little compared with the extended life that a garment gives,” Hamnett says. Her “pride and joy” was going into a second hand shop in Cheltenham and finding a pair of her trousers without the label inside, and the shop owner claimed they were 19th century British.

We find a pair of trousers with the Katharine Hamnett label stitched inside in this very Oxfam in Dalston. Hamnett is thrilled. Instead of seeing it as a notch off her paycheck, it is a sign that her mission is working. The trousers can continue their life. 

So, what would Katharine Hamnett say to encourage people to shop second hand this September? I am expecting an answer about ensuring people and the planet do not fall victim to the fashion industry, but Hamnett cracks a slight naughty smile and says simply: “Get your ass down to Oxfam.”

Find out more about Second Hand September including how to get involved here.

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