S1 E7
Fashion Reimagined
With Amy Powney
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas, and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life, by Wondercast Studio.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane. And it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change makers from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
My guest today is Amy Powney. She’s the creative director for the “It-girl” sustainable fashion brand Mother of Pearl in London. Amy is an environmental force in British fashion. She speaks often publicly on the importance of sustainability in fashion. And in January, she attended a sustainability summit hosted by Prince Charles and British Vogue at Dumfries House, the prince’s wellness and sustainability center in Ayrshire, Scotland. Powney was there, with a dozen other attendees, including yours truly, to help advise the Prince’s Sustainable Markets Initiative Fashion Taskforce on how to take the message of sustainable fashion to a wider audience.
Amy’s love for Mother Earth has deep roots: she was raised off the grid, on a farm in rural England. She joined Mother of Pearl straight out of university as an assistant fourteen years ago, and worked her way up to the top job. When she took over as creative director, she decided to transform Mother of Pearl from a traditional fashion company to one that fully embraces green practices.
In 2021, film director Becky Hutner made “Fashion Reimagined,” a documentary that follows Powney as she traces Mother of Pearl’s supply chain and discovers a host of environmental and humanitarian issues, including water pollution, deforestation and global warming. It will premiere this spring at film festivals. Vogue has called Powney: “One of the most clued up designers on the subject of sustainable fashion.” And the Sunday Times in London described her as “a voice for a new generation of designers.”
Amy Powney, welcome to The Green Dream. Thank you for joining us here in the studio in Soho, London today. Let's start by talking about what you're wearing.
Amy Powney: I do have my organic Mother of Pearl sweatshirt on. My coat is merino wool from Portugal, spun in Portugal, made into the coat in Portugal,so this carbon footprint is all in the boundaries of one country, and it's beautifully done. That's one of our proudest pieces and our best-selling pieces in the collection.
Dana Thomas: What is it called officially?
Amy Powney: It's called the Wren coat. There's two slight variations.
Dana Thomas: I see it has your signature giant pearls.
Amy Powney: It has the pearl shoulder. That is our iconic shoulder.
Dana Thomas: What are the pearls made of?
Amy Powney: They are plastic unfortunately, but they are recycled plastic.
Dana Thomas: Will you be moving into plant-based plastic in the coming years?
Amy Powney: When we turned Mother of Pearl completely sustainable, our fabrics was our main focus. And now we're moving into trims because it's much more complicated. But we are on the lookout to work out what we can do with our pearls.
Dana Thomas: And is that wool naturally black or has it been dyed black?
Amy Powney: It’s dyed. We do do the natural colors, so there are a few on our site and it's under our sustainable attribute, which is called “Raw but Responsible,” and that means it's not been dyed. Actually, one of the colors is called pearl, so we use that one and it’s off-cream, which is the wool’s natural color. And then you can get a few other tones, but you can't get black. You can kind of get a dark gray, but you can't get fully black.
Dana Thomas: Smoky gray?
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Dana Thomas: Must be very pretty. And your sweatshirt is made of cotton?
Amy Powney: It's 100% organic cotton. Yep.
Dana Thomas: Which is sourced from where?
Amy Powney: The cotton comes from Turkey, in this instance, but then it is woven, spun, finished into a garment all in Portugal, because in Portugal they don't grow cotton.
Dana Thomas: Portugal used to be a cotton growing country,
Amy Powney: But it's not anymore.
Dana Thomas: Not anymore.
Amy Powney: No.
Dana Thomas: And it too is dyed with natural dyes?
Amy Powney: We adhere to standards of dye, but you can't get black black as a natural dye, unfortunately.
Dana Thomas: Do you use natural Indigo?
Amy Powney: We don't use natural Indigo but I know you talk a lot about that. So tell me more and maybe we can think about how we can use it!
Dana Thomas: Well, Sarah Bellos in Nashville of Stony Creek Colors has come up with a natural Indigo that Levi's is now rolling out worldwide. So you can have natural Indigo at Mother of Pearl because it's now going to be available on an industrial level globally.
Amy Powney: Amazing. Amazing.
Dana Thomas: Natural Indigo is so beautiful because the color is just radiant. It's like a sapphire. It just glistens. So, for you, sustainable and eco-fashion is about materials, right?
Amy Powney: That's a big part of it, yeah. But I sort of like to think about sustainability as an entire approach to my business, rather than just focusing on one thing. But of course supply chain and product is the biggest thing that we make. So yes, materials are up there as our most important thing. But I like to think of it quite holistically, kind of every angle of how we go about every decision in the business, not just the fabrics.
Dana Thomas: So how would you define what sustainable fashion is?
Amy Powney: Sustainable business practice is about the people that run the company and putting people, profit and planet all into the equation equally and making sure that every decision you're making is thought through and is the best we can make. Could we make it better? And apply that to every single thing and make it the mantra in the office, engage your staff in the same way so that we're all making these conscious decisions all the time to think about what we're doing and rethink it and rethink it. And I think that's the true essence of having a sustainable business. And of course, the fashion, the supply chain, and the materials are you know.
Dana Thomas: That it's all of a piece.
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Dana Thomas: All your clothing is also ethically produced as well?
Amy Powney: Yeah, our main production is done in Portugal — small artisan factories, we visit them on a regular basis. And we have some in Turkey and we visit them too. The ones in Turkey are certified, because Turkey is a little bit more complicated in terms of social issues. Portugal, luckily, is governed by EU law and it makes it a little bit easier and we visit them all the time. So we've had one-to-one contact with them all the time and make sure that we're socially responsible as well as sustainable.
Dana Thomas: Everyone's paid a living wage.
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Dana Thomas: Which means that they can afford a house, feed, and clothe their families.
Amy Powney: Yep.
Dana Thomas: Would you describe Mother of Pearl as slow fashion?
Amy Powney: Yeah, I mean it does it adhere to the fashion calendar in that we have to make collections annually or seasonally. Some brands make multiple collections per year.
Dana Thomas: Boy, do they!
Amy Powney: And that can go into the tens, if not hundreds, some of them. We make four per year, and they're looked at in the fashion calendar four separate seasons, but we tend to look at them as two seasons in our business but we split them into two drops. So the stores are getting more products — they get four drops per year — but we design it very much under one umbrella. So we look at two seasons a year, winter and summer, and then we just have seasonal appropriate products to drop within that.
Dana Thomas: You're involved with Fashion Our Future, which is a social-media-pledge-driven campaign, with supporters like Amber Valletta and Mary McCartney. Can you explain what fashion for fashion our future exactly is?
Amy Powney: I launched fashion our future just before COVID hit. I'd learned so much about sustainability within the fashion industry. I’ve made inroads within the industry and started making quite a lot of noise, but was quite frustrated with how little the consumer knew. We were working to try and pass the laws. And that just went nowhere. And I thought if consumers don't know what a TENCEL fabric is or what an organic cotton is versus a conventional cotton, how's this going to scale up? So Fashion Our Future was a reaction to that and talking to people rather than industry. And the idea was that you could take one of ten pledges and you would choose to either be, for instance, and OAP, which was an old-age purchaser, so you're going to get about vintage, or you were a tree hugger and you were going to only make sure that your wood pulp garments was from TENCEL or a sustainable source. And there was ten different ones and they address all the different fibers and fabrics out there. And then you nominated a friend to do it. So you said, "I'm Amy and I’m gonna be a tree hugger this year and I nominate whoever and then they're going to do their pledge too." Unfortunately COVID hit just as we did it. And it really affected our business. So we had to really focus on Mother of Pearl. But it is going to be reignited this year. In line with a documentary coming out.
Dana Thomas: "Fashion Reimagined," which is directed by Becky Hutner, will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in mid-June.
“Fashion Reimagined”: We produce so many things. A hundred billion items of clothing every year, and three out of five of them end up in landfill. More collections. More garments. Newness, newness, newness, newness. I think at the, sort of, peak, there are 750 designs in a year. It’s nonsense. It’s complete nonsense.
Dana Thomas: When you talk about pulp-sourced fabrics like TENCEL, what does that mean? I think most listeners don't even know what their fabrics are made of, that polyester is a petroleum-based fabric that's basically plastic, and that Rayon and TENCEL and a couple others are made of tree pulp, right?
Amy Powney: Or viscose is — everything in the family of viscose — is made from wood pulp. So basically they chop down trees, then turn it into chippings, and then they pulp it and then they turn that pulp into fiber. Conventional viscose uses a lot of harsh chemicals along the process and journey. TENCEL is the same concept, but they use a lot less harsh chemicals. TENCEL, the holy grail of viscose fabrics.
Dana Thomas: It’s the greener version.
Amy Powney: Exactly, exactly. it's really complicated for consumers and what's the difference between conventional cotton and organic cotton? What's the difference between viscose and TENCEL? It's really complicated.
Dana Thomas: What's the difference between organic cotton and conventional cotton for those who don't know?
Amy Powney: When you think about agriculture in your food, you can just apply exactly the same concept to fashion, so imagine the way your carrots are grown. They're either grown conventionally, which is using pesticides, using mass industrial farming methods, or you can buy them from an organic local supplier and you know that the soil has been treated without chemicals. It's the same basically for conventional cotton and organic cotton. So just imagine it as a crop in a field the same way you would as your vegetables and one has been treated in line with nature and one has been treated in line with pesticide companies.
Dana Thomas: Industrialization.
Amy Powney: Exactly. Exactly.
Dana Thomas: Now you're very in tune to this because you grew up on a farm.
Amy Powney: I did.
Dana Thomas: In Lancashire, in northwest England.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: What was your everyday life like there? Were your parents hippies who decided to get out of the country or were they farmers and you just are a farmer's daughter? What was the life?
Amy Powney: We grew up in a small village, which was a farming village. And my parents just worked on the farms. But they had a piece of land and decided when I was about ten to sell up our normal house, let's say, and go move down to this piece of land which was completely off-grids: no water, no electricity, you know, nothing, and live in a caravan, which my dad built by himself, a small house for us. And they continued to work on local farms. We had a lot of animals and we had land, but we weren't actually farmers ourselves, but they worked on the local ones. We had a complete off-grid, unconventional childhood.
Dana Thomas: And you said your first job was at a radish farm, labeling packets.
Amy Powney: Yeah. One of the farms my parents worked out for a long time, actually, it was a radish farm. My parents couldn't afford to put us in childcare on summer holidays or half term. So we went with them and we used to just play, and eventually I was so bored that I said, "Can I just help?" and then they let me help and then I did so well, they started paying me and it was a win-win, to be honest. I was happy and could go shopping and my parents, you know, happy because I was doing something
Dana Thomas: You didn't grow up watching television. No “America's Next Top Model,” no Vogue magazines arriving in the mailbox.
Amy Powney: No, no, and actually, we could only watch TV when it was windy.
Dana Thomas: So then how did you pivot to fashion? How did you get into the fashion world from the farm?
Amy Powney: My family are not into fashion at all. We didn't even have a mirror in our house. I think we had one in the bathroom above the sink. Mum was totally beautiful. She is beautiful. But she worked on a farm, she didn't care about how she looked. My dad just wore his overalls every day. He didn't care. But I was creative. My mum was creative too. And so I went to art school, and then, bit by bit, on to textiles. And I wanted to be a costume designer, actually.
Dana Thomas: For the theater?
Amy Powney: For the theater, that was my dream. And then when I really thought about it, I felt like fashion would give me more avenues. Whereas when I looked at costume courses, they were very, very specific in terms of creating corsetry and period cutting. So I did fashion with an open mind and then ended up here.
Dana Thomas: And you landed the job at Mother of Pearl as an assistant in the cutting room sweeping the floors…
Amy Powney: I did.
Dana Thomas: …according to lore.
Amy Powney: Yeah, my first job was at Mother of Pearl — my first paying job anyway — was at Mother of Pearl.
Dana Thomas: But Mother Pearl at the time was not a sustainable brand, was it? It was a traditional High Street — would you consider it a department store brand?
Amy Powney: It wasn't High Street, but it was a department store brand and it was completely tiny, totally niche.
Dana Thomas: Sold only in the UK?
Amy Powney: Yep. It wasn't doing very well. You know, it was just…
Dana Thomas: Who was it founded by?
Amy Powney: So Maia Norman founded the company. And she's still a business partner anyway, but bit by bit she lost interest in it and I was working there fulltime and managing the studio, and then I ended up taking over the creative when the designer we had left. And when I took over as a business owner and creatively, I just turned my hand to sustainability.
Dana Thomas: And when was that?
Amy Powney: Nine years ago, I took over fully. But it took me a couple of years to find the gumption, let’s say, to stamp my mark on it. You know when you come from cutting fabric or sweeping the floors to becoming creative director, you're not appointed in that position. So you don't just walk straight into the role. I had to kind of grow into it.
Dana Thomas: And do so diplomatically with your peers.
Amy Powney: Exactly. Yeah.
Dana Thomas: And now employees.
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Amy Powney: My machinist and I started at the same time and I used to cut out the fabric and he used to sew it. Now I'm his boss.
Dana Thomas: Now, what did you do to make the company sustainable?
Amy Powney: I won the British Fashion Council Vogue Fashion Fund. And I'd started creeping sustainability in at that point, talking about it.
Dana Thomas: And that was in what year?
Amy Powney: Probably six years ago now. And with the award you win a monetary prize, which is £100,000.
Dana Thomas: Nice.
Amy Powney: Which to us was a lot of money. Of course, you also get the status of winning the award. And I actually used all the money to just go on a journey to: How do you ever make a brand sustainable? We didn't even know what we were going to find. We didn't we didn't know how you grow cotton. We didn't know what wood pulp was and how you turned it into fabric. So we went on this mission, we looked at our supply chains, we traveled to find where our things were growing, what the factories were doing, how we can close a loop on those things. And actually that's what the documentary will be about when it comes out. We went on a long journey. And then what we learned, we infiltrated into the brand, and bit by bit, we learned so much that we made the full brand sustainable. We didn't actually think we were going to be able to make it fully sustainable. We just thought maybe we could make a part of it. But we learned so much that it was amazing. We could actually apply that to every single part of the brand.
Dana Thomas: Are you going towards earning a B Corp certification?
Amy Powney: We’re just working now to work out what our goals are for the next few years because B Corp in concept I really like.
Dana Thomas: Can you explain what that is?
Amy Powney: B Corp, in basic, is putting people, planet, and profit all into the boardroom. So instead of the conventional linear model of profits and loss, which is how people look at businesses, it's about looking at it much more holistically and putting that into the boardroom. So all the senior people in the business think about what they're doing with the company. But there's lots of other kinds of certifications and other avenues to go down. So we're having a big assessment on what our goals are for the next few years. And is it B Corp? Is it that we want to be working more hands on with the factories, where do we want to invest that money, and what's going to give us the most return? But yes, we'd love to be B Corp.
Dana Thomas: Now at Mother of Pearl, you're extremely exigent, as the French like to say, about sourcing the wool of your knitwear. You ask: Does my woolly sweater come from happy sheep? Now, why is that important? Happy sheep?
Amy Powney: A lot of people don't understand about wool. And that's not just for knitwear. You know, that's in coats. It's in clothing. It's everywhere. And a lot of people assume, let's say, you've bought a sweatshirt in England, or it might even say Made in England — that the wool came from the sheep in England and it absolutely doesn't
Dana Thomas: There's very little sheep wool from England now, is there?
Amy Powney: Yeah, so you can use Scottish or British wool for carpets and quite coarse things or fillings and stuffing for things, but to make it into garments is too scratchy. There are a few Merinos here but it's few and far between.
Dana Thomas: And Merino being the top level of sheep and the softest wool.
Amy Powney: Yes, and Merino is the glamorous, fabulous, most pampered sheep.
Dana Thomas: The Ferrari of sheep.
Amy Powney: Exactly, it's got the soft fur that feels fabulous. But most of that comes from Australia and New Zealand. That's because they have to live in a warm climate, albeit sometimes that's too warm. And that's actually one of the reasons we don't have them here because the cold weather– they're not hardy enough, it could kill them. So they come from warmer climates, but unfortunately in New Zealand and Australia, they get an infestation called “fly strike,” it's like mites eat away at them. So to combat that they cut a lot of skin off the sheep, which is where the mites nest, but they do it without anesthetic. This is a process called mewling, and we absolutely don't take part in that. We don't disagree necessarily to remove the skin to make it more comfortable with them, but they should be done under anesthetic and treated better.
So we either work with certifications where they don't mewl the sheep or we work with wool from South America, because the breed of sheep and the climate means they don't actually get fly strike. So if you buy it from South America, you know it’s safe, or Portugal. And then, of course, shearing the sheep can be uncomfortable for them too. We went on the search for alpacas, actually, and they also go through the same process. And unfortunately what happens is you get kind of centralized points that buy alpaca or buy wool from multiple farmers. Some of those farms are huge and some of them are quite independent. And a lot of the independents are very poor, so they don't necessarily have the right kind of skill set or the right tools to shear them…
Dana Thomas: Or budget.
Amy Powney: …or budget to shear them in the right way. So sometimes shearing can be done in quite a cruel manner and it's almost impossible for us on this end of it to be able to tell which sheep were sheared well or not. And I did watch an alpaca get sheared and tears did roll into my eyes actually. And it made me think whether we should do it full stop. But if it's done properly, it shouldn't be painful for them. So we just try and…
Dana Thomas: Or stressful.
Amy Powney: Or stressful. I likened it to going to the dentist or something. It's only once per year and as long as it's not done in a horrific way, the sheep, if you get them from good farms, roam freely. They have a pretty good life on a whole if you get them organic and free roaming.
Dana Thomas: But happy sheep make better wool!
Amy Powney: Happy sheep make better wool, yeah!
Dana Thomas: Because, like us, you know, when we're stressed our hair falls out right?
Amy Powney: They say that about leather as well actually.
Dana Thomas: And if the sheep is stressed then I imagine the wool is tighter, crinklier. Fragile.
Amy Powney: I don't actually know the science behind that. But it sounds like it could make sense. I mean, I just want to make sure we use happy sheep for my own peace of mind.
Dana Thomas: Let's talk about denim for a second. I know from my research for my book, Fashionopolis, that the fashion industry produces six billion pairs of denim jeans every year and that at any given point of the day, half the world is wearing denim, which is kind of crazy. But then when you stand on the street corner, you look around you're like, "Oh yeah, that person is wearing denim, and that person, that person, that person." Ninety-nine percent 99% of the cotton used in those jeans is not organic is it?
Amy Powney: Nope, nope.
Dana Thomas: And ninety-nine percent of the indigo is not organic or natural, either.
Amy Powney: Yep.
Dana Thomas: And then there's the workers who sew the jeans. I saw a major denim label being produced in a sweatshop in Bangladesh by young teens in appalling conditions. Now, how do you combat all of that at Mother of Pearl with your denim line?
Amy Powney: So all denim first and foremost is organically grown and that's under certifications. Albeit the certifications are complicated themselves.
Dana Thomas: Boy, are they.
Amy Powney: We buy under certifications, but we rely on people in the field, so it's not always that straightforward, but that is how we buy our cotton. We also made sure we know where we bought the cotton from, so what country it comes from.
Dana Thomas: What are the countries you source from?
Amy Powney: Turkey is our main source for our cotton, but any cotton under certification is still down to these people vetting the fields. So we have to rely on these certifications. Certain countries, it’s trickier. We get ours from Turkey but that's primarily because our factory that produces our denim is also in Turkey and they are fully certified too and we visit those. But again, the way cotton is grown, it's the same concept as I talked about with the wool, so it's many farmers all come into a centralized place. So when you actually buy a pair of jeans, even though we might know it's all from Turkey, it could have come from five different fields, because it all just gets centralized and all mixed up. But we like to know what country it comes from to make sure there's no major issues when it comes to political or maybe social impacts on that.
Dana Thomas: Sweatshops and slave labor, scandals and the troubles in China with the Uighur, forced labor camps that pick about one-fifth of our cotton today.
Amy Powney: Exactly. So in sustainable fashion, you have to actually look at politics and economics as much as you have to look at your supply chain. With Portugal, for instance, we feel much safer because it's under the EU laws and regulations. We can go and visit it. The ones that are a bit more not governed properly, you've got to watch the landscape at the same time. So we buy under the certification, and we monitor our factory and we visit them and that's really the best you can do as a brand unless you own your own cotton fields, and your own factories.
Dana Thomas: And have you walked the cotton fields in Turkey?
Amy Powney: I have walked cotton fields in Turkey. But like I said, it's really complicated to know that that's going to be your cotton field, because it doesn't work like that, basically. You can walk your factory and you can meet your spinners, and you can meet your weavers, and you can talk to them about where they source their cotton. But it comes from multiple fields. I couldn't say that field went into this pair of jeans.
Dana Thomas: So in the end, this is about transparency, transparency in your supply chain, transparency in your products.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: You fight hard for transparency in fashion.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: Why is that? First, can you explain what “transparency” means?
Amy Powney: The idea that you as a customer are walking into a shop, buying a product, and you have an understanding of that product’s whole lifespan. Something says “Made in China,” it means nothing. It goes more beyond that.
Dana Thomas: And even that doesn't mean it was made in China, per se.
Amy Powney: Because they’ve stitched a button on. I would like to see content label say made, and grown in, spun and woven in, so that people really can see how far that garment’s traveled
Dana Thomas: Why is it important, do you think?
Amy Powney: initially it came down just to my own ethics and values and my own moral compass and producing things correctly. The more I've gotten into it, the more I've become a figurehead within the industry, the more I felt a responsibility towards it. And the more I felt that it's not just about me and my brand, it's about helping educate other people to make those changes, to make it bigger and the conversation bigger and the changes bigger.
Dana Thomas: And no doubt you're more sensitive to this having grown up on the farm and knowing where your food came from and helping grow it and nurture it for other people.
Amy Powney: Ultimately, as a teenager, I kind of wanted the opposite. I wanted the bright lights and the Adidas tracksuit. But I guess subconsciously knowing where things came from in the first place, you know, we couldn’t just switch a light switch on in our house and electric come on. We had to wait for it to be windy. Water was pumped…
Dana Thomas: Because you had a windmill!
Amy Powney: We had a wind turbine. Water was pumped from a borehole.
Dana Thomas: And that’s why, when you watched TV…
Amy Powney: That's why we could watch TV when it's windy. But for us, like, it wasn't — amenities weren't simple. It wasn't easy. We didn't have the flick of a switch. And so I think I understood from a very young age how privileged people are just to be able to turn their tap on and clean, hot water comes out, to be able to turn your TV on and it works and actually those privileges in our lives. I've never taken that supply change from any format for granted. And I think that's how I've applied it so quickly and easily to my brand.
Dana Thomas: In your Ask Amy column for Vogue, you did a whole piece on waste, meaning, you know, rubbish, trash, what do we do with our clothes when we're done with them? And you said that three out of five clothing purchases in the UK end up in landfill within the same year, and are only worn a handful of times. How can we change that thinking?
Amy Powney: This is why I launched Fashion Our Future, to try and make customers rethink their purchases. When I was young, it was expensive to buy clothes. It's cheaper now to buy clothes than it was back when I was a kid, so we only had a few items of clothing that we treasured. It was just what we did. I think it's the only thing in the world that's ever gone down rather than up, right?
Dana Thomas: And that's because of this global supply chain that's crunching…
Amy Powney: The industrialization…
Dana Thomas: The industrialization, crunching the prices of everything along the way to super low numbers, labor, farmers, crops, everything.
Amy Powney: The problem with legislation, which is for me fundamentally how we change, is a global issue. And the problem with global politics in general is then you have to have countries working together. Look at COP26. We're trying to get everybody to come together to make agreements, and supply chains are global. So if it was within the rules of one country, it would be easier to manage, but legislation is political. It becomes really, really complicated, but simultaneously we have to work on educating customers to think about their purchases. When they picked up a pair of jeans that were tem quid, that they didn't see them as a ten-quid-pair of jeans, they saw the true story behind it.
Dana Thomas: That it was made by somebody who's not paid a living wage. It's made of conventional cotton that was industrially farmed and treated with tons of chemicals. Because pollution is cheaper.
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Dana Thomas: Now, let's talk about laundry for a moment. You say you hardly ever wash your jeans. And you actually tell us that to clean them, you can put your jeans in the freezer! Tell me about that.
Amy Powney: I actually don't often put my jeans in the freezer, but you can do that and it does work.
Dana Thomas: And what does it do?
Amy Powney: It kills all the bacteria on them by putting them into the freezer, which is fundamentally what you're doing by washing them. But I very rarely wash my jeans. Maybe that's not a very nice thing to say. But I feel like the minute they've been in the washing machine, when you try and put them on they don't feel like your jeans anymore. I prefer the over-worn fit to my jeans. And so I actually don't like putting them in the wash anyway. And of course, obviously it's much, much better.
Dana Thomas: If you do, do it just on a short cycle to get the…
Amy Powney: Exactly, yeah, we wash everything in our house on 30, unless it's like something terrible has happened in my child's life or something!
Dana Thomas: Thirty degrees Celsius…
Amy Powney: Thirty degrees Celsius. Yeah.
Dana Thomas: Which is just warm.
Amy Powney: If everybody washed their garments on 30 degrees instead of 40, the energy saved would be phenomenal. Yeah.
Dana Thomas: And also the longer the clothes will last because you haven’t boiled them to death. The dyes don't fade.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: The plastic, the microfibers don't wash out.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: The seams don't fall apart because they've been cooked.
Amy Powney: Yeah, yeah.
Dana Thomas: Now you also say you can put your knit sweaters, your cardigans, your pullovers in the freezer, and what does that do for them?
Amy Powney: Well, that's the issue with moths as well actually, if you've ever got moths, putting them in the freezer…
Dana Thomas: They ate through everything in my closet during COVID. Devoured. They really like the good stuff.
Amy Powney: They like the good stuff!
Dana Thomas: So you put them in the freezer and that kills the bugs?
Amy Powney: That kills the moths. Yeah, that's what you have to do.
Dana Thomas: We try to give tips on The Green Dream. Here’s a good one: Freeze your jeans, freeze your sweaters ,and wash your clothes on the short cycle with cold water. Lower your, lower your water bills, lower your electricity bills, lower your shopping bills.
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: You have just started recently a rental platform at Mother of Pearl. How does it work?
Amy Powney: It's not our own rental platform, we bolted on to a rental company. Some of our products are rentable through them. But we have two elements of rental: if you've got an event to go to and you need a dress and you know you're not going to wear that piece over again, you could give it back and let somebody else rent it. And the other is try before you buy is our core classic pieces And the idea with that is somebody can road test it for a week or a month. If they love it, they feel like they're going to wear it every day, if it's gonna be there in their forever wardrobe, we basically give them the price of the rental back off their purchase. But it's a bit like test-driving a car. You test it, you see if you love it, and you fall in love with it, and then when you buy it, you know you're going to wear it over and over again.
Dana Thomas: Now you mentioned your forever wardrobe. Explain what that is, the forever wardrobe.
Amy Powney: Buying pieces that you know are you and that you will wear over and over again. Because of impulse purchasing, people often just buy things on a whim or think they want something and then they put it on and actually wear it out and realize, "What was I thinking? This isn't me. I don't want it." They bought it for a one-off event and then I never want it again.
Dana Thomas: They say in French a faux achat.
Amy Powney: That's much sexier…
Dana Thomas: Which means a fake purchase or a mistake purchase.
Amy Powney: But it happens a lot because it's cheap to shop. So we talk about really considering your purchase.
Dana Thomas: Now, do you think that renting clothes is truly sustainable? A lot of people argue, "Well, there's the dry cleaning." In fact, Rent the Runway has the largest dry-cleaning facility in the United States. Or there's the roundtrip transport of the garment. In the United States particularly, you're shipping them all over the country. Is rental truly a long-term solution for the fashion industry?
Amy Powney: I think this goes back to what's a truly sustainable business and that idea of a holistic mindset. So you could start a rental business tomorrow, let's say, and you could send everything out on a bicycle and pick it up on a bicycle and use eco-friendly washing and not use plastic, etc. Or you can set up a mass industrial one that ships globally, returns globally, and uses hardcore industrial cleaning. So it kind of depends on how you look at those businesses. I think rental can be sustainable. And I think the way we approach it is quite sustainable. At the moment, we are very regional-based rental…Unfortunately for our international customers but…
Dana Thomas: To keep it within London are…
Amy Powney: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: …and green cleaning?
Amy Powney: Green cleaning,
Dana Thomas: Meaning no petroleum chemicals.
Amy Powney: We don't suggest rental as this fast-fashion alternative. We're not trying to promote wearing something new every day.
Dana Thomas: So what is the best long term solution for the fashion industry? How will it meet the net-zero carbon goals of 2050 that were set by the Paris Climate Agreement? How are we going to get carbon out of fashion? How are we going to make fashion truly green?
Amy Powney: It's a really complicated question. And it's the same question that applies to fossil fuels. And...
Dana Thomas: Every industry.
Amy Powney: Every industry. And unfortunately, it requires people to be less greedy in terms of business owners. It needs people to put people, planet, and profit in the forefront, and not just profit. It requires consumers to change their behavior. But fundamentally, it's a global issue, and an economic issue, and it's about getting the super-rich to make some changes.
Dana Thomas: To give back.
Amy Powney: Yeah, it's really complicated.
Dana Thomas: And to think of everyone.
Amy Powney: Exactly.
Dana Thomas: Well, thank you, Amy Powney: for being with us. Amy Powney is the creative director of the sustainable fashion brand Mother of Pearl. And you can find Mother of Pearl on its website, motherofpearl.co.uk.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
We welcome back author and book critic Hermione Hoby, who reviews Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a collection of his essays by award-winning American author and nature writer Barry Lopez, published by Random House. As Hoby will tell us, Lopez spent fifty years documenting humanitarian and environmental concerns. He died on Christmas Day after a years-long struggle with cancer. Lit Hub calls Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World one of the most anticipated books of 2022.
Hermione Hoby: In 2017, three years before Barry Lopez died, the New York Times asked him about his motives for writing. Lopez, a revered, beloved, and profoundly influential figure, had behind him a half-century of exploration and nearly twenty works of fiction and non-fiction to his name, including Arctic Dreams, his bestselling, National Book award winning account of five years spent in the far north. He responded, however, with supreme and zen-like humility to this question. “I can tell you in two words,” he said. “To help.”
The simplicity of that response – “to help” – goes some way in explaining why the term ‘travel writer’ may be accurate, but is in no way an adequate description for what Barry Lopez did. Lopez, who died on Christmas day in 2020 at the age of 75, was more a seeker than a traveler, a person who approached each new place humbly, curious as to what it could teach him and how he could best honor it. As the British writer Robert Macfarlane put it, running through Lopez’s work is, “the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence.”
In the awkwardly titled and eponymous essay of a newly-published, posthumous collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, Lopez considers what he calls “the central project of my adult life as a writer.” It was, he writes, “to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.” It’s in this same essay that Lopez insists this: “We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape…It is more important now to be in love than to be in power.”
For Lopez, the world was there to be paid all possible attention, which is another way of saying that the world was there to be loved. In this sense, he was never a tourist — that is to say, a person for whom travel was a pleasure-seeking, sight-seeing sort of jaunt. Instead, his process was slow, thorough, and steeped in respect. With ingenuous frankness, he describes this process in an essay titled “On Location.” Often, he admits: “New and sometimes unfathomable dimensions would emerge in the evolving structure of the story I was thinking about writing.” With those dimensions would come what he identifies as “a feeling of faded comprehension.” As he immerses himself, for example, in subsistence hunting in Alaska and the racist policies surrounding the practice, he confesses to feeling “in over my head.” In another essay, he regrets his shortcomings as an observer. It is from this state of uncertainty and overwhelm, however, that he pushes through complexity, to find coherence and honesty.
The essays collected here all proceed with careful solemnity; the sense of duty is palpable and sometimes oppressive. It follows, then, that Lopez considered entering the priesthood but decided against it because, as he put it, such a life seemed “too easy.” Instead, he lived a worshipful life through his writing, with an equal sense of vocation. “I continued to rely,” he wrote, “on the centrality of a life of prayer, which I broadly took to be a continuous, respectful attendance to the presence of the Divine.”
As the rather cumbersome and grave injunction of this book’s title might suggest, one doesn’t turn to Lopez’s work for laughs. These essays are devoid of irony, wit, and frivolity in the same way an Arctic tundra is of Starbucks. There is however, an ecstasy in his language – a writer’s palpable pleasure in the transmutation of sights and senses into words. While exploring the Weddell Sea, boundaried by the Arctic Peninsula, Lopez relishes, “the opportunity to walk that pellicle, beneath a vault of starlight so intense that you could read your shadow in the snow.” A reader might also, encounter a word as wild and wonderful as “sastrugi” – meaning the dense, hard runners of snow that indicate the prevailing direction of the wind.
In one particularly reflective essay, Lopez writes this: “Whatever our individual failings might be, many of us, in the end, I think, wish only this, to make some simple contribution, a good one or an original one if that be our gift, to be recalled as having done something worthy and dignified with our time.” How satisfying to read this last book of his and realize that Lopez got his wish.
Dana Thomas: New episodes of The Green Dream come out the first and third Tuesday of the month, so we’ll be back in two weeks with award-winning British designer Katharine Hamnett, a pioneer in sustainable fashion. Hamnett made her name in the early 1980s by printing statement T-Shirts that declared important political and social commentary. Her most famous read: “58% Do Not Want Pershing,” a reference to the United States' placement of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe. Hamnett wore the T-Shirt to a London Fashion Week reception with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in 1984.
Katharine Hamnett: I wasn't actually gonna go. As Jasper Conran said, "Why should we go and have a glass of warm white wine with that murderess?" But then I thought my family – my father was in the armed forces, and he was actually a defense attache, worked in the cabinet office, actually even working in the Pentagon during the Bay of Pigs. He was representing the British military. So I got politics from a pretty early age. My family was also quite snobbish. They loved to have pictures of themselves with kings and queens and presidents. So, at St. Martins, I went from kind of very posh rightwing Republican-type chick to this super socialist. So I thought, "Well, actually, yes, they can have their vile pictures. I'll get one that they can put in a silver frame on the piano." So it was a sort of a practical joke really on Thatcher. I had no idea that it was gonna go, so – it's almost like a millstone around my neck because I can't escape it. And it was quite funny.
Dana Thomas: Hamnett has been needling the fashion and political establishment ever since, rightly earning her the nickname: "The Bad Girl with Integrity." We hope you'll join us.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
This episode of The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. Written by Dana Thomas, with a book review from Hermione Hoby (HermioneHoby.com). From Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. The Green Dream is a production of Wondercast Studio. You can find us online at wondercast.studio or at Wondercast Radio. I’m Dana Thomas, the European Sustainability Editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column in the magazine or online at Vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and on Twitter where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. Thank you for listening.