Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
Amy Powney
Intro:
… a colourful, sometimes shocking education and Hutner’s fine narrative structure, coupled with Powney’s appealing warmth and drive, will have you invested in the fate of her Mother of Pearl label and the future thinking around our relationship with fashion.
Each year in London’s Soho, scores of young designers gather at the stylish Cafe Royale for the announcement of the British Fashion Council and Vogue award for Emerging young designers.
The documentary Fashion Reimagined walks us through the doors of the 2017 event to hear that Mother of Pearl, a label known for luxury sportswear-influenced clothing, took out the 200,000 pounds sterling prize, a package that included mentoring and sponsorship.
Creative director Amy Powney may have been an unusual choice in some eyes, but a very deserving one according to the BFC. What Powney does with her win is the subject of this documentary by Canadian Becky Hutner. Hutner has immersive experience in documenting fashion and culture for London-based DUCK Productions, credits with top commercial labels and, importantly for Fashion Reimagined, her first feature, espouses sustainability in her life and work.
Powney sets out to create a completely sustainable line of clothing for her fashion show. The endeavour becomes ridiculously and frustratingly compromised as she determinedly tracks down the origins of fabric from sheep farm and cotton manufacture through washing and dyeing to sewing by fair trade employees and transportation that has the smallest footprint possible.
What makes the documentary great viewing is the clear narrative that reveals the staggering pollution and compromise that the fashion industry creates. Then there’s Powney, who we follow in every frame. Described as a force and a powerhouse by her fashion contemporaries, she has a warm, focused and contained presence on screen. In her early 30s, she is the epitome of natural in her look and style. There is nothing of the fashion diva here.
Growing up in a modest house in east London, Powney describes herself as “very separate from the modern fashion scene.”
Influenced by her father, an environmental activist who relocated his family to living on the land when Powney was still young, she looked for role models working in sustainable fashion. They were as rare as unicorns, basically just the label People Tree and the pioneering Katharine Hammett.
Powney’s grim statement that “fashion is one of the most destructive industries on our planet” is backed by a roll call of shocking statistics. Five out of seven cotton growers use child labour. One denim garment uses two years of one person’s drinking water in the production process. By 1980, we were buying three times as many clothes as before, with three out of five garments ending up in landfill in their first year. This unsustainable trend led to a raft of couture house designers stepping down. Twenty, thirty years later, emerging designers, especially Powney, are questioning how fashion and environmental concerns can ever be reconciled.
To create her fashion show, Powney embarks on a search to trace every stage of growth and production, from sheep farmers in Uruguay to European cotton growers. It’s fascinating to watch her make decisions that turn the fashion collection process on its head. To begin with, she halves the number of garments in the collection. Usually, designers begin with their aesthetic vision and buy fabric to match. She researched fabrics – only wool and cotton as it turns out, and then only in closely monitored situations – that were sustainable, then created her designs to accommodate availability.
Her clothes are beautiful, bold easy styles, luxe and elegant. There is no compromise when it comes to design. Even then, she barely got a break on that first collection and it is testament to her uncompromising vision that in the four years since, she has been at the vanguard of radically changing the way we view, understand and relate to fashion.
The documentary is a colourful, sometimes shocking education and Hutner’s fine narrative structure, coupled with Powney’s appealing warmth and drive, will have you invested in the fate of her Mother of Pearl label and the future thinking around our relationship to fashion.
