MIMICKING MOTHER NATURE

Few designers mix humour and seriousness as well as ANYA HINDMARCH, whose ability to merge important messages about sustainability with witty designs and even wittier concepts have made her a real force to be reckoned with. Here, the British fashion designer explains what it means to design with purpose. Fashion with purpose is something that we really care about.

Fashion can actually have quite a significant purpose in that it can influence people in terms of the way it makes people feel – something as simple as affecting our moods, making us feel happier or changing how confident we might feel. It’s pretty significant in that way. Another way is that it might influence people to behave in a more sustainable or less wasteful manner.

Luxury isn’t very luxurious if it’s doing harm.

There’s an absolute requirement on our part to look at sustainability ... not look only at how we can repurpose waste and keep it out of landfill, but how can we design from the beginning, so that we don’t need landfills and have things return to nature. Nature is brilliantly designed – you don’t see an apple in landfills because it breaks down itself and ends up nourishing the soil. So my idea was to make something that behaved and mimicked nature. Two years on, our mission hasn’t changed and I think there’s more need than ever. We’re seeing weather patterns changing and it’s quite scary, so there’s a real need to come together and find creative solutions that work.

My North Star is always common sense.

It’s quite hard to navigate the sustainability world because there’s a lot that everybody’s still learning. There are innovative ideas that people think are really important but then realise perhaps they aren’t so sensible after all. We want to make sure we can have a sustainable business, one that carries on employing people and do the work that we do, but also behaves in a sensible way. And that’s really important to me.

I wanted the [Anya Hindmarch] Village [on London’s Pont Street] to be a real destination.

We used to have many stores around the world and I wanted to have an authentic place where I could work on all the creative concepts. And it’s really established now and it brings people from all parts of the world. Will I create that somewhere else? I don’t know. It’s hard to have the same local impact when you’re so far away. But we’ll see. I never say never.