Amy Powney wants to educate everyone and make great clothes for women – WWD

LONDON – Amy Powney is on a mission to educate the fashion industry and the general public with her debut documentary, Fashion Reimagined, starring Becky Hutner.

The two women met five years ago when Powney won the BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund award. She told Hutner that she will use the money from the fund to make her Mother of Pearl label sustainable.

“Hutner just said it was her calling in life to follow my journey,” Powney told WWD in a Zoom interview.

Hutner was a dashing filmmaker, documenting every step of Powney’s business and activism.

“None of us knew what we were going to find or what was going to happen. I didn’t have a plan, we just went from there and she didn’t have a narration or a storyboard because she didn’t know what we were going to do,” Powney said of the shooting process.

At the end of the five years, Hutner had amassed more than 250 hours of footage, which she edited down to 92 minutes for a UK release on Friday

The experience for Powney was touching on both a professional and personal level, she said.

“It’s quite a privilege to have someone capture a moment of their life and time, especially as a mother. I always think that my children will never really remember me and that they will remember me as an older woman,” said Powney, who never intended the film to be promotional material for herself or her brand.

The film is divided into three parts: the statistical part, the supply chain, how a brand works, and Powney’s personal journey.

The documentary takes a different approach to others in the category, such as The True Cost and Unravel, which explore rather than confront fashion’s problem.

“The most important thing about this film is that it teaches you a problem, and I want people to get away from that and say, ‘I didn’t realize how complex the fashion industry is, but actually this girl did something about it, she can so do I,” Powney said, referring to her small upbringing in the north of England.

Powney sits on Copenhagen Fashion Week’s advisory board and believes London needs to do more.

“There is too much talk and too little action. That’s a pretty harsh statement, but climate change affects everyone,” Powney said.

“It was too much money and too much pressure for seven minutes of your life that we weren’t uplifted by. We were exhausted from it and ended up disappointed because it’s such a big moment that took weeks and months to work on,” she adds of her experience directing runway shows.

Powney wants brands and designers to care more about the lifespan of their garments beyond the beginning and end points, rather than thinking about life after purchase and how they are treated after purchase.

With her Mother of Pearl brand, she’s taking it slow and cautious.

“To be honest I only want to make clothes that are well made and make women feel good. All I care about my brand these days is getting a message from a customer that says, ‘I have this and it makes me feel great,'” Powney said.

“I just want to simplify it and go back to what Coco Chanel was doing back then, which was just about making great, high quality products that were done right to make women feel good. I don’t really feel like much more than that,” she said.