Workwear: product designer Bethan Wood's exotic dress sense

Tucked away in a maze of clothing warehouses and welding workshops in east London is Bethan Wood’s studio – a skylit, double-storey space she shares with a group of interior designers, marble sculptors, fellow product designers and makers. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling in a beautifully organised collection of references: the tiny eastern European Christmas trinkets that inspired an Hermès window display, a marbled mirror and a postcard of Yayoi Kusama’s 2014 installation Infinity Room. It’s an eclectic mix, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the combination of fabrics and textures draped over Bethan herself. The product designer and founder of Wood London is a recurring figure in design festivals from Salone in Milan to London Design Week, and wherever she goes is instantly recognisable for the liberal sprinkling of accessories and layers upon her person, like an exotic bird perpetually finding scraps of neon and silver to adorn herself with. We sat down with her to talk about the irresistible draw of the flea market, and the advantages of using your own body as a kind of living moodboard. Do you think your visual research overlaps with the way you dress? Yes. I’ve always been a really visual, physical person, and I understand the colour and proportion of things much faster when I can touch them or pick them up or see them. My collecting of fabrics and clothes, and in particular at the moment earrings, is interwoven with the objects that I collect. Sometimes I try and wear an object that may not meant to be worn if it looks like it will work that way. Also, I have a slight problem in that I like to collect stuff. Are you a bit of a hoarder? Everything has its place… [laughs] When did you first start dressing up, and how has it changed over time with your practice? I’ve dressed up since I was about 14 – that kind of age when you become aware of yourself a little bit more, those school years. I started then, but up until I did my Masters I wasn’t comfortable with that connection between my work and the way I dressed. I found the fact that people always assumed that I was a fashion designer or a textile designer really difficult. I just wasn’t ready to combine the two. Then, being at the RCA really made me think bigger and wider – it pushes you to find out what it is that you’re bringing to the table rather than another designer, and I realised that dividing my dressing, or my enjoyment of that amount of colour and pattern, from my work, wasn’t something that I needed to do all the time. I don’t put colour and pattern on every single project that I do but I definitely think that since the RCA I’ve had more of a free flow between the two worlds. Often I’ll start dressing in colours or in tones because I’m trying to digest or understand a different palette. "Up until I did my Masters I wasn’t comfortable with that connection between my work and the way that I dressed. I just wasn’t ready to combine the two."

• Bethan Wood That’s interesting, so you use your clothes as a way of unpicking what you’re doing in your work as well? Yeah, I think it all becomes one at some point, and I’ve sort of embraced that now. It’s all to do with money too, you know? Sometimes if I have some extra money and I want to print some fabric of one of the patterns I’ve been working on to make it into some clothes, then I will. I like to keep a mixed practice where I’ll do big and small projects, so sometimes I’ll do a fabric and sometimes I’ll do jewellery. Of course I’ll wear the jewellery for a while because I need to check that the stuff works. For me, especially when stuff is patterned and coloured you need to make sure that it works well. Do you make those clothes yourself? I used to make a lot of my own clothes, but my sewing machine died, so unless I can bribe my mother to do some sewing for me then I work with seamstresses or makers. By the time you print all the fabric or you make all the marquetry, the cost of that alone is quite a lot, and then my hands aren’t as skilled in doing very specific craft jobs like joinery or sewing. The vanity of wanting to do everything myself is outweighed by wanting the end result to be the right quality. Can you tell us about what you’re wearing today? Today I’m wearing something in between – I will have many more layers on if I’m not in the studio, and I have more layers on now than if I was purely here to chop loads of wood downstairs, or that kind of thing. I’ve got my new granny slippers that I found at the weekend. I like my jazzy granny. I don’t think a granny has actually pre-owned these, they looked very new when I put them on. Then I move from granny to Marks & Spencer, with my socks. I like that every once in a while M&S manages to make socks that look like they’re from American Apparel, but only for a split second, and then they go back again. I’ve got a slight M&S sock addiction at the moment. I like these ones because they’re really neon with this weird skin tone,