FASHION REIMAGINED

Amy Powney has always been a bit of an outcast in the fashion world. As a kid, she grew up on a farm where water came from a well, and power— from a wind turbine built by her dad. Raised in a minimalist environment, she would get to school by foot, where she was bullied incessantly for the way she dressed. Fast forward some 20 or so years, and this girl from rural England made all the heavyweights of the fashion world listen up.

Eventually becoming the head of the cult label Mother of Pearl, Amy was unsettled by the enormous waste and carbon emissions that go hand in hand with fashion, and embarked on a three-year journey to create a sustainable clothing collection from field-to-finished-garment, called No Frills. What seemed like a simple check list to begin with—natural materials; transparent supply chain; respect to animals—turned out to be an exhausting, often disheartening odyssey, as documented in this film by director Becky Hunter.

Insisting on seeing the cotton fields and sheep farms for herself before buying materials from prospective suppliers, Amy was often met with a bewildered reaction—no other designer had ever demanded to know where the material comes from originally. That’s just not how things worked. Over the course of this eyeopening documentary, we observe how her personal revolution became the catalyst for huge societal change; a change that made us question that seven-pound T-shirt or the “sustainable” tags suddenly dangling off every garment in every store.

Passionate and unrelenting in its quest for the truth, the film will make you re-think your entire relationship with clothes.

Fashion Reimagined is in cinemas on March 3