Director – Becky Hutner – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 100m
*****
A fledgling designer appalled by her industry’s environmental record attempts to do fashion sustainably – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 3rd
The title put me off before I even knew anything about this documentary. On further investigation, however, its subject is up-and-coming fashion designer Amy Powney who decided, in the interests of sustainability, not to do fashion as fashion industry wisdom has always done it, but rather to find out if it was possible to do fashion in an environmentally sustainable way.
We are told that if the fashion industry were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest polluter, preceded only by the US and China. So clearly, this is an industry with a problem.
Amy had always wanted to design clothes. At Kingston University, studying fashion, she got hold of and read Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist tract No Logo then felt herself increasingly at odds with the ethos of the course. Her background was a little different from most of the students: she grew up in the Lancashire countryside, off grid, on a farm with her sister and parents.
After college, she got a job sweeping the floor at small, indie UK fashion house Mother Of Pearl where she slowly but surely worked her way up to become first studio manager then the company’s creative director, clearly a very determined and driven young woman.… Read the rest