When Amy Powney joined London fashion house Mother of Pearl in 2006, eventually scaling the ranks to become its creative director (Powney now owns the majority), she was a woman on a mission: A mission to create the UK’s first truly sustainable luxury brand.
Nowadays, sustainability is a word so bandied about as to have almost entirely lost its meaning; but, back when Powney began shouting about it, very few would listen.
“I’ve felt unheard and an outsider for so long,” she says over Zoom, as we discuss her upcoming docufilm Fashion Reimagined, directed by Becky Hutner, that’s set for release on Sunday (April 9).
The film focuses on the years after she won the BFC / Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2017, and was awarded a £100,000 cash prize, which she used to set about creating a collection, called No Frills. The range was created from entirely organic and natural materials, with a transparent supply chain, that put social responsibility, respect to animals, and low-environmental impact first and foremost — a first at the time.
The main takeaway from watching Powney and her colleague Chloe Marks’s tireless and impressive efforts? Ticking all those boxes, while making clothes that are beautiful and stylish enough for people to want to wear, is really damn hard.
These people [farmers] feed and clothe us and we pay them horrendous wages and treat them like they’re nothing, but in a way they are royalty. We are alive because of them
Raised on a farm in rural Lancashire with no running water or electricity, Powney has a deep-seated appreciation of the natural world that has motivated her path through the polluting world of fashion.
“My childhood gave me so much respect for all the people making our stuff,” says the mother-of-two, who worked on the farm as a child, chopping cabbages ready to send to Tesco.
“We really take the food on our plate for granted but, the truth is, if we didn’t have farmers working for almost no money, we wouldn’t be able to eat. None of us knows how to grow our own food, we can’t weave our own dresses… We are all so ignorant as to where our stuff comes from and it’s really bad.
“These people feed and clothe us and we pay them horrendous wages and treat them like they’re nothing, but in a way they are royalty. We are alive because of them.”
In their mission to create a collection that does no harm, Powney and Marks grapple with the complexities of fashion’s long and winding supply chain. Their deep dive unearths suppliers that have no idea where their cloth comes from, farmers that have to fly their wool to a different country to be spun, and the struggles of finding sheep farms producing wool soft enough for contact with human skin, on farms that don’t engage in cruel practices like mulelsing. It’s a bogglingly complex riddle that they are forced to fly to Peru and Uruguay to solve.
Are we seeing the industry change or are we seeing an abundance of greenwashing?
In many ways the film, which took five years and 250 hours of footage to create, shows how far the fashion industry has come, and in others it’s clear that very little has changed. As the many info slides that flick up throughout attest: Fashion is the fourth-largest contributor to climate change in Europe after food, housing, and transportation, and the third-largest consumer of water. In 2020, China produced 48 billion metres of fabric — enough to wrap around the world more than 1,200 times. And of the 100 billion items of clothes produced globally each year, three-fifths end up in landfill within a year. Deeply, depressingly scary stuff.
“Things have changed in that people want to talk to me now, as it’s [sustainable fashion] in the press, but are we seeing the industry change or are we seeing an abundance of greenwashing?” asks Powney who has, in many ways, become a poster woman for the eco-clothing movement.
“People are almost treating me like an influencer in the field. In a way, it’s nice to be heard but is it more frustrating to be heard and nothing is changing? There are some amazing changes going on in certain aspects. But there’s a lot of hot air.”
We all are just racing so fast. That’s the nature of fashion and the modern day
While undoubtedly serious in subject matter, the film has a hopeful feel — Mother of Pearl pulls off the impossible and presents the No Frills collection at London Fashion Week, on time and to reasonably (though not sufficiently) enthusiastic reception.
And Powney herself is generally optimistic. That said, she’s crystal clear on what needs to change. “Fashion needs to be fully legislated and governments are doing nowhere near enough,” she says. “I think governments just have not connected the dots between fashion and climate change. They have been really dismissive of it.”
Could this be because fashion is a largely female industry, I ask? “Probably,” agrees Powney, who has been invited to consult for several major conglomerates and the British Government. “No doubt I’d have more success if I went to talk to them about ‘industrial textile practice’… maybe they would relate to that more,” she adds, with a laugh.
At times, Powney and her team found the endless cameras intrusive (“there were definitely moments where you know you’re trying to do your job, make your business work, run meetings, and then you have a camera crew in your face being like, ‘Oh, we really like what you’ve said, but can you just do it a little bit more upbeat’”) but, overall, she says the process was therapeutic; a moment to sit back and take stock of everything she and her business has achieved.
“We all are just racing so fast. That’s the nature of fashion and the modern day and, actually, we don’t just sit back and kind of appreciate or give ourselves a pat on the back for what we have done.”
If anyone deserves a pat on the back, Amy Powney does.
