[traffic sounds] [chatter] [camera shutter clicks] [camera shutter clicks] There are many wonderful things about editing Vogue, but this has been one of the most inspiring things to do.

In all the years that I've been on this panel, this was one of the longest deliberations that we had.

But we did decide.

This year we decided to award the prize to Amy at Mother of Pearl.

[cheering] [Amy] I don't think I actually really thought we would ever win it.

I think that really stamped a bit of confidence in me.

It's like if Vogue are gonna award me this, maybe I am doing something quite good.

- It's given us incredible confidence that she's going to take this prize and build on this platform.

[Amy] What is it that I want to do?

- I think Amy's just a force.

[woman] Amy Powney is the creative director of Mother of Pearl.

[woman 2] This UK label's powerhouse of a creative director, Amy Powney.

[woman 3] Amy makes these beautiful outfits that you can just throw on and scrape your hair back and leave the house feeling glamorous but without being too overdone.

It's really elegant and feminine, but in a little dark way, which I really like.

My highlight of the day has been Amy Powney from Mother of Pearl.

[narrator] It would be easy for a designer to have their head turned by all the glamour, but Amy remains essentially modest.

[Amy] Being a fashion designer is a complete privilege.

That is my childhood dream.

But it's one that comes with huge responsibility.

Fashion spans so many environmental issues.

The quantity that we're producing, the waste at the end of it.

Everything you create has a footprint, and in fashion it's huge.

We don't live in a time now where you can just design something because you want to design it.

What can we do?

What options are out there?

[applause] How do we somehow find the balance of keeping the enjoyment of fashion but thinking about the impact of clothing on the planet?

[whirs] Looks pretty grim.

[laughs] But it tastes good.

The only thing I ever really wanted to do was art.

I could sit for hours and make things.

My mum used to work in a fabric mill, and she would bring home sort of old remnants of fabrics, and we would cut them up into triangles and we would make them into patchwork quilts.

I feel very, very separate from the London fashion scene.

I don't know.

I never felt like I fit in, really.

In university, I read the book No Logo by Naomi Klein.

No Logo was all about social inequality in the manufacture of clothing.

You know, how little factory workers were getting paid.

The sort of health and safety conditions that they were working in.

I was on one path, sort of in my fashion lectures, like talking about, you know, Galliano, and then I read that book and I just completely ricocheted and was like, "No way.

I'm not doing that.

I'm doing this."

It totally changed my course.

As things developed, I realized the impact that fashion was having on the environment.

The chemicals involved.

The sheer quantities of everything that we're making, the pollution off the back of it, the carbon emissions.

The way that animals are treated.

It just goes on and on.

I think if you ever just look at a product, you just have to realize it came at a cost.

My graduate collection was on sustainability, and that was 12 years ago.

The tutors were just a bit baffled by me.

They were like, "What's this girl doing?"

There was only a couple of brands doing something about it.

It was People Tree and Katharine Hamnett.

Katharine Hamnett was an icon for me at the time.

I was like the black sheep.

How can I be both of these people at the same time?

Cos they seem such a contradiction to each other.

The fact is, fashion is one of the most destructive industries on our planet.

The fashion industry has just raced so fast ahead and so in front of itself that we're all chasing our own tails.

- Amy.

[Amy] I feel like I've lost quite a lot of years of my life, running so fast through them.

Can we have Selena's dresser?

Selena's dresser.

[Amy] The way the fashion calendar works is you have pre spring/summer collection, spring/summer collection, pre autumn/winter collection, autumn/winter collection.

In big brands, they work to many more, maybe 12.

High street don't even work in seasons.

They work on a weekly drop.

We produce so many things.

100 billion items of clothing every year, and three out of five of them end up in landfill within that first year of its life.

More collections, more garments.

Newness, newness, newness, newness.

I think at the sort of peak, I made 750 designs in a year.

It's nonsense.

It's complete nonsense.

[woman] Big news out of the fashion world.

Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz is stepping down from the famed fashion house after 14 years.

[woman 2] And there wasn't a lot of forewarning about this.

It counts as the second one of these we've seen, by the way, in the past week.

Raf Simons has just said he's leaving Christian Dior.

He did give some indication about his concerns about the fast pace of fashion these days, what's being expected of designers.

So it's a shock and starts to raise questions about what on earth is happening in fashion.

[Amy] Going home.

[laughs] We're going home.

- Going up north.

- Going t' up north.

- T' up north.

[Amy] I grew up in the north of England, in a sort of relatively normal house, and then my parents decided to move to a piece of land and live the good life.

I would hate to see someone I know right now, like from school or something.

Which meant that I lived in a caravan, with no water, electricity or heating.

My father sunk a well with a hand pump, which is how we got the water.

I don't think as a teenager I necessarily thought it was a good life.

But in hindsight it was definitely like an amazing experience to live through.

There's Mum.

You look nice.

[John] Have you just woken up as well?

Have you been asleep on the train?

You look fine.

You look better than I do.

[Amy] You look well.

- I look well?

Listen, what's going on here?

He's just woken up about two seconds ago.

- Have you woken up?

Oh my God, look.

It's so good, isn't it?

Did Grandad make that?

I guess in some ways it set a ground of my interest in sustainability.

[Nick] Right, are we having a race?

Ah!

[John] You brought some wind with you, which is very useful.

We now have electricity.

That powers all the house.

So all the electricity in the house is coming from that.

[Amy] So the caravan used to be along this wall.

- Yeah.

- My favorite memory though, was when we'd have to go out here with a bucket, pump the water, and heat half of it up on the stove.

- That's right.

- And then you would run round the back of the caravan... - Yes.

- And pour it over the top of where the shower was in the bathroom.

- Exactly.

- And me and Natalie would get a shower by you running around the outside, standing on a ladder and pouring it over the top.

[all laugh] [Amy] Look, there's the shell suits.

The shell suits.

Basically, we were dressed in shell suits when it was like the height of fashion.

When I got to high school, my friend invited me round and I turned up in a shell suit, and she just burst out laughing.

[John] I didn't know that.

See, these things come out years later.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think Fat Gypsy was my nickname.

[all laugh] I guess going to school and being the odd kid, like, it was hard sometimes.

[Shirley] Amy went to high school and got bullied.

[Amy] I just worked and worked and worked and worked till I had enough... the money I wanted.

I just went and spent it on clothes.

And the cool kids let me in their group.

People always say why fashion and not illustration?

Or why fashion and not fine art or something?

And I honestly just think that was the turning point for me.

It was the social, like, status that you got.

[Shirley] The acceptance.

- Exactly.

- Hello, darling.

[Amy] I think the sort of idea originally of fast fashion, you know, every class being able to be fashionable, was like a really positive starting point.

I just think how it's sped up and to the extent that we're at now is fundamentally the problem.

He looks very elegant, doesn't he?

[John] He's lovely, yeah.

[Amy] Would I do it now?

I don't know.

Would I go into such a complex industry that actually has a really bad footprint on the planet?

Actually should I just quit tomorrow and just go and work for an NGO or something that I actually truly believe in?

[John] The answer for you to just do nothing and not be involved with it, that'd be wrong, cos you're in a position to do something about it to make that better.

[Shirley] You can't change the world on your own, so what you've got to look at is look at your own life, look at what it is that you can do.

- Yeah.

- That's me.

See?

I wasn't always miserable.

- [Nick] Amazing.

[Amy laughs] [Amy] I've decided to use the money from the Vogue Fashion Fund to turn Mother of Pearl into a sustainable fashion brand.

My mission is to create a collection that's completely sustainable from start to finish.

The new sustainable line is gonna be called No Frills, which is a sort of humorous take on the idea of the value line from the supermarkets.

When I do things, I have to do them properly.

It's a problem I have.

Some people call it pedantic, I like to call it perfectionism.

It's really important to me that my new sustainable line is organic, traceable, uses minimal water and chemicals, is socially responsible, it considers animal welfare, and it's produced in the smallest geographic region.

Can we even do this?

I mean, can you even talk to the cotton pickers or the farmers?

Like, how do you even get there?

If I can't make Mother of Pearl sustainable, if people just don't pick up on the message and care about it too, perhaps my time in fashion will be over.

We are moving into our new studio today.

It's quite hard to change a system when you're already in a place, so there's something really refreshing about moving somewhere new and saying, right, these are the sort of rules and this is how we're gonna run this place.

- We often put in bins that isn't paper?

- Like?

- I don't know.

- Just general waste.

- I think everyone should just use these bins.

I'm gonna have to pre warn them I'm gonna be slightly dictatory about it.

We could recycle these.

[man] Yeah.

[Amy] The image that Hannah's just popped up is the first Mother of Pearl collection I ever did.

When I left university, I wanted to work for a brand that had meaning.

I wrote to Katharine Hamnett.

But no one really wants to give you a job.

Nobody's got money to pay graduates.

And London's a very lonely city if you don't know anyone.

I decided to go and do a pattern cutting course at Central Saint Martins.

It was gonna be a couple of thousand pound.

I thought, "I just don't have the money."

I only met the woman once, but she had recommended me to quite a few people.

I got a call from someone at Mother of Pearl.

They said, "We're looking for someone to actually pay."

It wasn't sustainable, but I just settled for knowing that I was working for a small independent.

It made tiny amounts of clothing.

I've gone from assisting Van, at the time, who's our machinist, and I worked my way up to creative director.

A big part of moving here was that we could do things a bit more greener, a bit more ethically.

Basically, if you produce anything, you've created waste for the planet, and we are huge producers.

And the difference on cutting the collections into two and reducing the quantity of what we're making, that's more sustainable than probably anything we'll do.

First thing I did was change the business model, so I moved from making four collections a year into two collections a year.

By doing this, it freed up a huge amount of my time, which was then focused on developing the No Frills line.

- I had no idea where to start.

Literally no idea.

As a product developer, I work very closely with Amy.

The designer will create the designs, and then we make it happen.

I've worked in fashion since I was 19.

I've worked for lots of companies.

The objective was never find something that's not harming the planet.

It was always find something that's a good price, that looks beautiful.

It did start off with me just googling: "What is a sustainable fabric?"

We started right at the beginning.

[Amy] We basically go to a supplier and we buy a fabric.

Our conversations have been: "Where is this fabric coming from?"

When we've been asking our suppliers, they don't know, because there's so many people in the chain.

[Chloe] Take a cotton shirt, for example.

There are many steps across many countries from its point of origin to our closet.

Step one: the GMO cotton seed is engineered by a huge multinational corporation.

Step two: the cotton is grown with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, then harvested.

Step three: the cotton is spun into yarn.

Step four: the yarn is woven into fabric and treated with heat and chemicals to make it soft and white.

Step five: the fabric is dyed with more chemicals.

Step six: the fabric is cut and sewn into shirts.

Step seven: the finished shirt is shipped to the brand's warehouse.

Step eight: the shirt is shipped to the customer, who is none the wiser that the shirt is better traveled than she is.

Our mission was to trace everything back to the start of the process and work our way from the first field to finished garment.

When you're designing a normal collection, there are hundreds of different fabrics.

And that, just the plain one.

- I really like that one too.

[Chloe] You can't just resource a fabric and make it sustainable, it doesn't work that way, so we were very limited with our options.

We quickly ruled out synthetics because they're not sustainable.

Polyester.

- Nylon.

- Acetate.

- Spandex.

Sort of no different than virgin plastic packaging.

Then you make it into a garment that sheds off mini pieces of plastic every time you put it in a washing machine.

[Chloe] And they don't biodegrade.

And they just sit in landfill for 200 years.

Then we decided we wanted to use natural fibers.

- When it's finished, I want a jumper to either biodegrade or to be recycled.

We decided to stick to the two fibers, which was cotton and wool.

- We had to use geography and work out what countries actually grow cotton.

Turkey comes up.

That was the closest place we could find.

Turkey is a huge player in the organic cotton business.

OK, so this is an email from a Turkish mill.

"Dear Chloe.

Nice to meet you."

"We are buying yarn from another supplier, but if you want to see yarn dyeing, weaving and finishing mill, of course we can help you."

"Thank you for your email.

We would really like to visit the cotton fields as well."

"Dear Chloe.

We don't have cotton fields."

"Hi, Filiz.

Where do you buy your cotton from?"

I haven't had a reply from that one.

- Someone said they've had this talk about how cotton from Turkey is like funding ISIS or something, so then I'm like, oh, my God.

- So I got my notebook out.

One: order 20 meters of this fabric.

Two: check ISIS affiliation with Turkish cotton.

Three: need some more zips.

[laughs] We just found it really difficult to get to the source of where the cotton was coming from and find out how we could actually visit the fields.

It does make me suspicious, and I wonder why you can't get a straight answer.

Then looking at wool.

Our knitwear's made in Hong Kong.

We asked them where they were getting their wool from.

They physically could not trace back their yarn, so I had no idea where that wool was coming from, if I'm totally honest.

We assumed the wool was coming from Australia, because most wool comes from Australia, and there is a problem of flystrike there, basically little bugs that burrow into the sheep's skin, so mulesing is the process that's done.

Mulesing is a process that needs to be done.

It's just unfortunate that lots of farmers don't have the time or care to anaesthetise the sheep.

We both were adamant that we wouldn't use wool from sheep that had been mulesed.

[bleating] There are lots of sheep in the UK, but you just would not wanna wear a jumper that was made from English sheep.

They are really scratchy, very coarse.

It's used for carpets and definitely not things that you put on your skin.

[Amy] You assume that the mills in Scotland must be weaving wool from Scotland, but often they're not, they're weaving Australian wool.

[Chloe] Merino sheep make really top quality wool.

[interviewer] Are there any merino sheep in the UK?

There is one woman in Devon who breeds merino sheep.

But when I spoke to her, she only has enough wool for one brand and one brand only.

[bleats] Her wool is, like, booked up for years to come.

It would be easier for everyone involved if we could use wool from England, work with factories in England, but the UK doesn't produce any fibers to make fabrics at scale.

[bleating] So Première Vision is a huge, huge, like humongous textile fair in Paris.

It's like the mecca of, like, fabrics.

Everything is there.

If you don't find it there, you can't find it anywhere else.

[♪ Jacqueline Taïeb: "La plus belle chanson"] [Chloe] So me and Amy rocked up.

We thought, "Great.

There must be a sustainable section."

[laughs] I was like, "So where's the sustainable part of Première Vision?"

They just looked at us, like, what?

We're gonna have to go look through every single fabric.

[Amy] Went and asked a million stands.

[Chloe] Every agent we spoke to, it was like they'd never heard of it before.

It was like Amy was the first person to have, like, asked the question.

People say what you wanna hear.

- Can you have organic cotton?

They're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem."

[Chloe] They would put like a leaf on it or something if it was sustainable.

- Is it really organic cotton?

They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's definitely organic."

- We just thought... that's bullshit.

[Amy] Threw our head in a giant glass of red wine at the end of the day, going, "This is just... How are we ever gonna do this?"

It wasn't just going to a sort of fabric agent and buying, you know, a nice piece of cloth that had a good sticker on it.

It meant we had to go and see it for ourselves.

- This is gonna be really, really tough and maybe impossible.

[Amy] The one person that we met at Première Vision that we actually trusted and could tell that he knew his stuff was Michael from SEIDRA.

He's an owner of a mill, and he has transformed his mill to be very, very sustainable.

- Amy was just like, "Let's just go over there and actually see it for ourselves."

[Amy] It's like The Sound of Music up there.

[Chloe] There's huge logs outside the mill that he uses to generate power.

[Amy] Instead of using chemicals to soften his wool, they put steam into the actual factory.

- We thought, "This is the guy who can help us."

We asked him where he got his wool from.

We definitely wanted to use non mulesed, organic wool and something that could be traced back, but it's not straightforward.

He obviously gets wool from lots of different places.

They couldn't trace back specifically where the wool had come from.

But then he did have this one supplier.

We're sitting in this office overlooking the mountains, and he showed us this video.

[narrator on video] Lanas Trinidad.

Total quality and sustainable production of combed wool in harmony with the environment.

It is located in Uruguay, a country where the production of wool is natural.

[Amy] Oh, my God, this whole organization is completely on our wavelength of what we're trying to achieve.

[Chloe] They did seem too good to be true.

- And I just said, "Come on, Chloe, let's go."

She was like, "OK." I actually can't believe we're in Uruguay.

- Neither can I.

[Chloe] So I emailed Pedro.

"Hi, Pedro.

I'm Chloe from Mother of Pearl.

We'd really like to come and visit your sheep."

[Chloe laughs] - I'm Amy.

Hi.

Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

How are you?

Good, thanks.

- I'm Chloe.

Nice to meet you.

- We've been trying to make Mother of Pearl more and more sustainable.

At the moment, we're making our knitwear in China, and we want to change completely.

And Michael showed us the video for your company, and we were really excited, so... And you don't have, in Uruguay, you don't have mulesing?

[Pedro] No [Chloe] We've made it at last.

[Amy] Exactly.

[Pedro] [Amy] If you see a private farm and they're running it really badly, or the workers are being treated badly, do you have a policy in your company to say we're not working with these people?

- You know, here is a small place.

- Yeah.

- And you know everyone.

- Yeah.

- And also everyone knows you.

- Yeah.

[Diego] Good morning.

[Amy] Good morning.

[Pedro] Amy, Diego.

- Diego.

I'm Chloe.

Nice to meet you.

- Chloe.

[Amy] Diego's your brother, right?

Come on.

[bleats] [Amy] Which is huge.

[Amy] It's about a way of life.

[Chloe] Yeah.

[Pedro] Exactly.

[Amy] Oh, wow.

It's amazing.

[whistles] [Amy] My boyfriend when I was 14, he says, "OK, I've got a really, really big surprise for you."

And he came and picked me up and took me to his farm, and in the middle of the farm was his tractor, and in the window was my name.

It had "Amy".

He'd called the tractor after me.

And all the girls were like, "What did you get?"

And I was like, "Nothing, nothing."

- No problem.

[Sara] So lovely.

[Amy] It's so beautiful, yeah.

It's amazing.

[Amy] Standing in that field sparked something in me.

I've come from there, which is the polar opposite of what we do in London, and a lot of people that are involved in the London fashion scene didn't grow up like that.

It's like it's a completely different world.

And I think for a long time I pretended I didn't come from that, cos I sort of didn't quite know how to fit in.

I'm just gonna celebrate this and talk about it, cos it is who I am, and it's like something just clicked into place.

This is the path, like, I was supposed to be on.

This is what I was always supposed to do.

So this is typical, a truck coming from farms.

[Amy] And how many kilos would that be?

[Pedro] The bale?

200 kilos.

- Yeah.

- 50 sheep.

50?

- Yeah.

- What micron?

- [in Spanish] [man] Veinte y medio.

[Pedro] 20 and a half.

- Ah, you know just from looking at it?

He touches, and his... and sure either it's 20 and a half, 20.4 or 20.6.

It's coming from Salto.

- Yeah.

- See, farmer.

Michelena is the family name.

- Yeah.

How long has this gentleman worked for you?

- Mañana cumplo treinta y uno.

[Pedro] Tomorrow is 31 years.

- Wow.

Wow.

[Amy] Do you recycle the plastic bags?

- Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

- [laughs] Just checking.

I like the smell of it.

[Chloe] Yeah.

- When you have the shearing season, is this whole room full?

[Pedro] Oh, yeah.

[Chloe] [Pedro] - It's so satisfying.

[Chloe] It's so satisfying.

[Pedro] [Amy] You know, for me the most interesting thing is that you think about the whole process, so from the sheep in the fields to the production, and then you make sure it all comes back round to start again.

You know, the textile industry, it makes so much product, and it ends up in landfill sites, and nobody thinks about its future.

Now we have to think about that.

Pedro, have you ever had any other designers come here?

- You're the first one.

- We're the first.

[chuckling] [Pedro] We have to row at the same time in the same direction.

[Amy] We're trying to find within the walls of one country the raw material grown, the raw material spun, the raw material woven or knitted and turned into a final garment.

If there's a wool industry here, surely they'll have spinners here.

Amy.

[man] Amy.

- I'm Chloe.

Nice to meet you.

I emailed you.

- We were trying to see if we could spin and knit the wool here to make our garments, and this was the only factory that we could find.

Where do you import the wool from?

And so you don't knit anything from wool from Lanas Trinidad ?

Is that because there is no spinner here?

[woman translates into Spanish] [Carlos] No.

[Amy] There's no spinner.

So you get the yarn from Peru or Italy, you import it, but you make this in your factory in Uruguay.

So what happens probably is you will sell the wool to China and maybe you buy the wool from China that came from here before.

[Carlos] Exactly.

[Chloe] Cause it has to go there to be spun.

And it's crazy, like it's crazy.

No problem.

No problem.

[Amy] You can't buy a jumper made in your wool.

But, I mean, you don't know where to go to buy... - Yeah.

You don't know.

Yeah.

- Amazing, no?

Uruguay has a wool industry.

- [Pedro] Yeah.

- But you don't have a spinning industry or a knitting industry or a garment industry.

[Pedro] We used to have.

Uruguay became too expensive in US dollars.

It was difficult for them to compete against China.

We just want to buy the wool from you or know it's coming from you.

[Chloe] - The minimum contract would be one container, and one container is 13, 14 tons.

[Amy] What's that?

[Chloe laughs] [woman] [Amy] So it's times two.

26,000 units.

Wow.

We can't do that.

- It's too much?

- It's so complex.

We're potentially the first designers to turn up at the wool farm and say, "OK, I wanna buy your wool."

[Chloe] Yeah.

- And everyone else is like, "It doesn't work like that.

The system doesn't work like that.

We don't go to these people direct."

We should never be talking to them.

- No.

I just don't want to ship Uruguayan wool all the way over to China to come all the way back to the UK to be sent back out, ironically, probably, to like a customer in South America or a customer in China anyway.

- Exactly.

- It's just ridiculous.

- I know.

[Amy] My dream coming here was to find a system within Uruguay.

[Chloe] Yeah.

Our vision of everything being so tight knit is maybe a bit old fashioned and maybe that just doesn't exist any more.

[Chloe] If Uruguay can't make our garments, there must be a country nearby that can.

[Amy] Peru might be a good option because it's obviously so close to Uruguay and we'd heard that a lot of knitwear was being produced in Peru.

Oh, so sweet.

[laughs] So, two, five, six, seven, eight.

Ten meters of each, yeah?

[Chloe] Hola.

Are you Hernan?

- Hi.

- Hi.

I'm Chloe.

Nice to meet you.

This is Amy.

- Hi.

Nice to meet you.

We've been to Uruguay to see the sheep farms.

We were looking to see if anyone spun the wool, but in Uruguay they don't have this industry.

It's all done here.

[Amy] It's amazing.

What we're trying to do is get Uruguayan wool from the supplier we're happy with to here for them to spin it.

[Amy] Yeah.

[Chloe] Once we'd met Hernan, he put us in touch with the major yarn suppliers that everyone works with.

- This part is where we steam the yarn.

- Like when you curl your hair?

- Exactly, yeah, as you can tell.

[laughter] [Amy] And you just use steam or you use chemicals?

[Andrés] No, just steam.

[Amy] How long has she worked here?

[Andrés] Thirty-four years.

[Amy] Wow.

Her mum, her mum.

Amazing.

[Amy] Wow.

[Chloe] Qué bien.

- We would take, like, four to five weeks to develop a sample.

- I mean, we'd have to... That's longer than we normally take, isn't it?

Five weeks to develop yarn.

The lead times were much, much longer than we were used to, but we could work around that and design earlier.

Would you be able to guarantee that the wool is from Lanas Trinidad?

- To be completely honest, we rarely have a customer saying, "I want specifically the merino to come from this place."

[Chloe] Yeah.

- Uh, but it's something that we can do for sure.

[Amy] Great!

[Chloe] It just seemed like this group of people were doing everything we wanted, and also really willing to help us along our journey.

So it sort of felt like we'd got a break at that point.

[Amy] It's very hard to find one country that does it all, and Peru does it all.

[laughs] But what a nice man.

- This is good.

- Yeah, but also don't want that cos it's plastic.

- I actually need one of these, so...

I can measure my things.

- But you know it's gonna break in, like, five minutes.

- Yeah.

- But anyway...

When I was at university, I used all alpaca for my final show.

Aw.

[camera shutter clicks] Cuántos años?

Los niños?

[man] One or two days.

[Amy] Two days?

Oh, wow.

Aw!

They're amazing, aren't they?

- What a fashion adventure.

If we're gonna do sustainability, you've gotta tackle the classic pieces.

I wear denim pretty much every day.

My dad has jeans, like, Nick has jeans, my nan probably has, like, some denim in her wardrobe.

It was cool in American workwear back in the day, and it's still cool today.

Denim's such a classic staple.

You can wear it over and over and over and over and over again, because it lasts.

It must be the most iconic piece of clothing.

But denim's actually one of the dirtiest products out there just for the water and the chemicals that it uses.

[Chloe] Conventional cotton uses pesticides which are incredibly harmful to the environment.

[Amy] It not only affects the soil.

It also affects the workers.

They're inhaling that all the time.

[Chloe] The further along the supply chain you get, the closer you get to the raw materials, and it's normally where there's the most vulnerable people being exploited.

It's the people in the supply chain that I feel for the most.

The fact that workers get paid absolutely nothing.

And when I think of the flipside of that, it's so that someone can buy a T-shirt for so much cheaper.

You can't buy a T-shirt for two pounds unless something terrible has happened along the way.

That is impossible to make that garment and to have the supply chain be correct.

It is physically impossible.

Organic cotton doesn't use pesticides.

[Amy] And we've learned that there are some companies actually working to the best possible standards, not only environmental but also social responsibility too.

[Chloe] Despite having hesitations about working with Turkey, it remains the closest place to source organic cotton from the UK.

So we found some organic denim producers in Turkey.

They could grow, spin, weave and produce the denim all in one country.

- Which means the carbon footprint is a lot lower.

We don't know if we can get to the cotton farm in Turkey yet.

- I haven't, like...

I've tried a few times, but unless we're like... [Amy] Unless we just do maybe...

The big, big problem is not being able to see where the organic cotton is grown.

[Amy] In one meter of fabric, you might have cotton from five different places, so it's really impossible to work with just one field to one final product.

If I can't work out a completely 100% sustainable alternative, what's my better practice in the interim?

[Chloe] Turkey ticked so many other boxes for us.

It's definitely worth us going there and seeing what Turkey has to offer.

GOTS is a certification body to ensure that everyone in the supply chain gets paid a fair wage and everyone is working as sustainably as possible.

[Amy] It's a way that if you can't personally vet it, you can have some satisfaction knowing that, you know, those suppliers have been audited.

[Chloe] Because we can't visit the cotton farms, we knew that we had to have a factory that was GOTS certified.

We went to visit a denim weavers called ISKO .

I've never seen denim being made before.

The cotton is spun.

The yarn is dyed into an indigo color.

[Amy] Indigo is quite a harsh dye.

[Chloe] But with GOTS certified fabric, the dyeing process is monitored.

ISKO use 50% less water than the industry standard and are aiming to use less and less.

Next step is the weaving.

The yarn's woven into denim fabric.

We found a denim factory called SARP who have all of the certification.

The guy who runs it is really into sustainability.

He also employs ex prisoners to work in his factory.

[Chloe] The denim arrives at SARP.

It's cut.

It's stitched.

[Amy] Double stitching was for longevity.

Rivets were for longevity.

Cos it was supposed to be the most hardwearing garment you ever own.

Really, the history of denim is workwear.

It was designed to last.

[Uraz] [Chloe] Normally, if you just buy the fabric, it's ready to go, whereas denim is like a whole other ballgame.

[Amy] With denim, you have to wash the product, so it has to go through chemical treatments to make them look aged and vintage.

So people want, like, stonewashed looking jeans, which historically was a pair of jeans that someone had worn years to get them looking like that.

But now we want that look but we want it off the shop floors, so then we apply loads more chemicals back to it to get to that point.

But there is a laundry in Turkey that does that sustainably.

[Uraz] [Chloe] We've found organic cotton that can be made into garments all in one country, which is a miracle for us to find.

We still really wanna go and see the cotton fields and see where it all begins.

[Amy] But we might have to just accept GOTS certified and not have control of exactly what farm it comes from.

We've learned that you can't see everything with just your own eyes.

[Chloe] Certifications just play a massive importance in it.

Some parts we have to trust that what people say they're doing is true.

Unless I'm gonna sit and weave the fabric myself and grow the cotton on the balcony, I can't do any more.

[laughs] - I thought Inca Tops said that they can spin Pedro's wool.

[Chloe] So they're still trying to find out.

He's, um... - But we know we can truck it to him, don't we?

- Well, that's what they... that girl said.

- Yeah.

- Um, so... - I think they will.

- I'm sure they will.

But it's still not 100% confirmed that we can definitely use his wool.

We're starting to see a few problems with Peru.

We're getting emails through that are a bit disconcerting.

- I just worry that that's cutting it fine, I'd say.

[Amy] We thought that Peru was gonna be able to confirm that they could use Lanas Trinidad wool.

[Chloe] Another problem with Peru is their lead times.

We only have three months to make a full collection, and it took Peru three months to make three samples.

It's gonna be much more difficult to work with Peru than we thought it was gonna be.

We asked them, "Please, this time can you do it as quickly as possible for us?"

"And next season we'll make sure we design earlier."

"Hi, Chloe.

We will not be able to help you with this order.

We know that the fabric is in stock, but producing this amount of pieces will make us incur extra expenses.

Sorry for the bad news."

They might have got a huge order from another brand and that takes up all their production time, and they're gonna have to take that over our small units.

They didn't have the time to work with us any more.

- I mean, seriously... - There was no way we could use Pedro's wool.

It's just, like, heart wrenching when you've worked so hard to try and get something done.

It just all sort of crumbled.

- Reality is hitting when you get back to your office and you have to make product and it has to arrive on a certain time, and if they can't do that, then we don't have a company anyway, so, um... [Chloe] You're always under that time restraint of getting the collection to stores within the delivery window and for the start of the season.

We're just always dependent on the businesses that buy our clothes.

We were three months behind, not knowing where we were gonna produce the garments.

I just couldn't see how we were gonna make this happen.

[Amy] You know, I've met Pedro and I believe in what he's doing.

I want to find a way to work with him.

It's like every day there's something else to overcome.

- She's got the registration number.

So Amy has to start from scratch again.

There's honestly so many things I admire about Amy.

Her pure drive and resilience.

- We should work out how many steps are in the process for that.

- It's more than... Basically, when I spoke to her, she said that it's either done in... is it Austria?

- And then it comes back to us to get made, so it's three countries.

- Yeah.

- It's not too bad.

[Chloe] At the beginning, we couldn't work with Michael because he was using wool from lots of different places.

It was mixed all together, which meant it was untraceable.

But some of that wool does come from Pedro.

[Amy] We tried to buy Pedro's wool directly, and it's just a system that... we can't do that, it doesn't work.

But that's Michael's business and he could do that.

[Chloe] We begged Michael to only use Pedro's wool for our fabric.

[Amy] A lot of manufacturers just go to the market and find the cheapest one.

But he went, "No, no, I only want his."

So he linked it all together for us.

- We understood what Amy's mission is.

[Chloe] SEIDRA saved the day, definitely.

[Martina] - We wouldn't be using Pedro's wool if it wasn't for Michael.

It definitely took more countries than we'd set out to use.

But we were able to trace back the full wool supply chain, which is an amazing achievement and something we've never done for any other Mother of Pearl garments.

So we've got our wool supply chain down.

We've got our cotton supply chain down.

Now it's time for Amy to design the collection.

[Amy] All of a sudden my cloth, my fabric, I treasure it more because I understand it more.

If you look at sort of 1920s footage of Coco Chanel, her cloth was her craft, in a way.

She couldn't make great garments without great cloth.

And we all kind of sped up too fast in this generation and we lost our love for the craftsmanship, in some ways.

I feel so much more emotionally connected to what I do.

We never actually designed what we wanted to make and then went and found the supply chain.

We went and found supply chains and thought, "What can we make?"

So I completely flipped the process on its head.

No Frills wasn't about the product.

It was about the possibilities and the learning process.

[Chloe] We wanted to make something really special with Pedro's wool, and I do really think that the jacquard is that.

Watching the jacquard machine is just absolutely mad.

Yarns like woven over each other creating fabric from some threads is just magical.

[Amy] It is one of the most luxurious fabrics because to weave it on the machine takes a lot of time.

And a lot of expertise to do it.

I've never seen a sustainable one before.

[Martina] - So this is actually 40% wool from Pedro, 60% organic cotton, um, jacquard mix, which is really, really beautiful.

There could have been a sheep that we saw, his wool could be in this, like definitely could be.

It's amazing that we've actually got this far.

[Amy] It's the first time we're gonna be showing the buyers No Frills.

I'm feeling really excited, actually.

I feel like Chloe and I have been on a major journey.

Ready to show what we've achieved, have a conversation about it.

[woman] And she's the designer.

[Amy] It's basically like our core collection.

And the price points are really... - Iconic.

- Exactly, iconic pieces, into shirting, denim for summer.

So it's supposed to be everyday wear, basically, and then the cherry on the top is that it's completely sustainable.

And that's not just organic.

It means it's social responsibilities.

And I've worked really hard on, like, the supply chain.

So it's carbon emissions as minimal as possible, stayed in one country to grow, to weave, to manufacture and to finish, with the minimum chemicals that you can do.

[woman] 158.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

- Thank you.

- Nice to meet you.

- Ciao.

- See you.

- I don't think we need that one.

It just seems like we've kind of been done there, done that.

[Amy] Yeah, yeah, fine.

But does your PR department or something, do you think they'd be interested?

[Amy] It hurts a bit.

I guess when you design, it's a bit of...

It's your opinion.

It's a bit of you.

I think if it's not in the media or you don't hear other people talking about it, perhaps I seem a little mental.

Yeah.

We all share one common thing.

And we're all told by every scientist what's about to happen , and everyone's just going, "Oh, well, let's talk about something completely different."

[Katharine] It was frightening how people just really didn't want to take it on board at all.

I think people found it very much too hot to handle.

I thought, "Fuck you lot.

I've actually got a voice.

I've found my voice and I'm gonna use it."

[cheering] [Amy] Katherine Hamnett was a real inspiration for me when I was at university.

She was one of the only designers working in sustainability.

[interviewer] What was the industry like in the early '80s?

We knew very little, we had no idea that we were doing any harm, so I thought we'd just do a quick check.

You know, it came back a complete living nightmare.

Just cannot carry on making clothes at the expense of environmental devastation and human suffering.

- Did you feel a little bit like the industry was freezing you out because of the stuff you were asking?

Yeah.

I mean, it's still a bit ongoing.

I was being rubbed out of history.

Hi.

- I'm Amy.

- Hi.

Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- How are you?

- I'm good.

I wasn't like you, you know.

I was...

I think I only got really interested...

I mean, I've always loved nature, but, you know, when I went to fashion college, I just wanted to be rich and famous, you know, the best fashion designer in the world and that was it.

And it was only really, I think, when I had kids and realised that everything that we're doing is threatening the life of your child, you know.

But I've kind of battled with the industry from the very beginning and had doors slammed in my face, and told, you know, "You come in with this ethical and environmental shit, you can take your collection and fuck off" from a leading player of the Italian clothing industry.

Yeah, I think anybody that doesn't care about it is not human.

- I know, and that's the bit that fills me with slight dread.

- It's really scary.

[Amy] But how do we move this entire ship and get them on board with it?

- We need to... reinvent the fashion industry, and I don't think that the industry is gonna do it by itself.

- No.

And reinventing is totally... totally right.

That's the only thing we can do, cos it's gone so far so quickly.

- I think we're kind of on the knife edge right now.

- Completely.

- Even if you think you're losing, you've gotta carry on fighting.

- I agree, yeah.

- Never give up.

- Yes, keep fighting.

[Amy] Um... Let's try one from here, though, to see if we could make that work.

So let's try... - That's where the headbands are... [Amy] Chloe and I, you know, we go through the rough with the smooth together, you know?

[Chloe] We've worked so hard and invested so much.

Hi.

I'm Chloe.

Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you both.

- Hi.

I'm Amy.

You look amazing.

- Thank you.

[Amy] I think we keep going.

Oh, my God.

You look so good in that.

It's what we believe, and we keep seeing what we can do.

Yeah.

Yeah, OK.

It's like a puzzle, but we're nearly there.

- [laughs] The press is out.

[Amy] This is the Observer, and it was written by Kate Finnigan, who came in the studio to take this with me a few weeks ago.

The whole title is about how I'm not a natural fit for fashion.

You know, before I made, you know, we made beautiful clothing, but this way it's sort of, I guess, got more of the heart and soul.

It's just much more sort of connected to me, in a way.

- Can I take this to read?

- Yeah.

- Thanks.

[Amy] I remember the first time I talked about my background to an editor.

She was so rude to me, um... and I didn't talk about it for a long time after that.

There definitely feels like momentum, but I do hope I'm not in my eco chamber.

[woman] The environmental and human impact of fashion is insane.

1133 people died making clothes for western brands.

Activism this year, it's been a really hot, hot year for activism, and people are starting to realize all over the world that they can be more than just consumers.

That's not all we are.

- What's special about today is today, ahead of our presentation, it obviously calls for a bit of a special breakfast.

- Where's that puppy?

- Don't know.

- Roxy!

- She's being far too quiet.

[Amy] What have you done?

What happened?

- Fuck.

It's 10 to 12, man.

- Hi.

- Hi.

You all right?

- Yeah.

- OK, can we go upstairs for the run through?

[Amy] How long have we got?

15 minutes?

The review of my show, it sort of validates you or doesn't validate you.

OK, ready?

Change!

Stay.

In any industry, if you come out and say something that's quite powerful... You stay.

No, no, you stay.

- We're starting in nine minutes.

...people seem to always then pick away at the things you haven't done.

- OK, final call, everybody.

[Chloe] I feel so massively responsible for making this happen.

I'm ready to panic.

- We've got first look ready here.

First look ready?

[Amy] If this doesn't work, then... [Chloe] These things never start on time, right?

[Amy] ...I don't know if fashion's for me anyway.

[Amy] Have people been let in?

Why is anyone letting them in?

They're not ready.

We're not ready.

We're not ready.

[man] They said to come in.

[Amy] Who said to come in?

[Hannah] We had to start.

- Jesus Christ.

Hello.

- Hi.

How are you?

- Good.

How are you?

- Nice to see you.

- This looks gorgeous.

- Thanks.

Thanks.

- How does it feel?

It's finally out, the collection.

- The collection is out.

I don't know if the models are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

I haven't checked in on it yet.

- Gorgeous.

- It's looking good.

- OK, fine, fine, fine.

[woman] I'm wearing head to toe Mother of Pearl.

It's No Frills special collection, and I love it.

[man] What a lovely, really lovely presentation.

- Hi.

Hi.

Yes, I do.

Hi.

How are you?

[woman] I love sustainable fashion, and I love how it's becoming, like, more and more.

- Everyone's starting to talk about it, yeah.

[woman] I absolutely love the new collection.

I love that there's a whole capsule of ethical and sustainable clothes in there.

- Amy's designs, Mother of Pearl, sustainability, it's a match made in heaven for me.

It's like a big tick.

[Amy] I put my money where my mouth is.

I believe in all this.

But before I start saying we all need to change, I've gotta make it work.

This is just the beginning too.

This was just... We can do it.

[woman] - To be honest, I just suddenly feel like I've totally found my way.

[Amy] So she decided to write me a poem.

"Long, long ago in a very small town lived a little girl dreamer For her style was renowned She wanted to be a designer, you see And determined she was, between you and me So off to the Smoke, she set off in haste To make her designs that were just to her taste But after a while she then stood her ground And told all around her something so sound We must save our planet but do it in style So here's my collection I know it's worthwhile."

I know.

It's so sweet.

I know.

Is there a chance to make things better?

Like, I don't really know.

I have faith and I have hope in it, but I also have doubts in it.

I did actually get an email this week, saying, like, "Do you have anything sustainable that we can push?"

- Oh, well done.

- Apart from you guys, off the top of our heads, we didn't have anything else.

I think the long length really works, with the more volume at the top.

- These are amazing, OK?

- We were talking about it in a meeting the other day.

- Everyone should be doing it.

- Yeah, exactly.

- [woman] How's it going?

[Amy] Really good.

It's been super busy.

- Been a lot of buzz about you.

- Everyone that has been here today is just going on about sustainability.

So it's, like, perfect.

- Amy, you're telling me that everything on that rail was sustainable?

- Yeah, apart from the green, but, everything, yeah, everything.

Yeah.

- That is, um... That's really cool.

- [laughs] - My girl's growing up.

- I'm growing up.

I'm growing up.

- So I was doing a speech at Soho House in LA, and they asked me what brands I was into, and I just went, you know, "You guys need to know MOP.

MOP, MOP, MOP."

I think it's your time now.

[Amy] We just signed with Neiman's.

We've got Bloomingdale's and Saks.

[barks] - This is what happens.

[Chloe] She's an expert in sustainable fashion.

It's gone from being a small company with a bit of press to everyone wanting to talk to her, wanting to know her opinion.

[Amy] This is Vogue.

This is my column.

"Ask Amy: Is My Woolly Jumper From A Happy Sheep?"

[Shirley] The papers I'm reading, I'm opening it and there's my daughter.

I don't think she's realized just quite how big it might be.

[Amy] Gwyneth Paltrow.

Phoebe Waller Bridge.

Adwoa Aboah.

Saoirse Ronan.

Daisy Edgar Jones.

Zawe Ashton.

Emma Thompson.

Vicky McClure.

We did a shoot together and she was really funny and we got on really well.

- I could not be more delighted with the launch of a new wool scarf designed by Mother of Pearl 's Amy Powney.

[Clare] Mother of Pearl and you are just not normal.

A high fashion, sustainable brand that is really emphatically about being sustainable as well as beautiful, it's not very common.

- So we're in Fitzroy Chapel, and it's filled with our pearl pits, 400,000 balls, which are all recycled.

We found a company, they just basically rent them out for events.

The idea is to highlight the issues of microplastics in the ocean which basically come out of your synthetic garments when you put them into the washing machine.

- Well, Amy Powney... - ...the creative director of the designer brand Mother of Pearl.

- I think mass consumption is the main, main problem that we're faced with.

A hundred billion garments were produced last year.

Three out of five of them end up in landfill within the first year that you purchased them.

At the moment, legislation isn't in place to sort of put that pressure on the brands.

So 10% of all our profits this month will go to help clean up the ocean.

It took me doing this project to actually sort of stand on my own two feet and say, no, this is what I wanna do and that's it, and, you know, like it or don't like it, it doesn't matter.

[Emily] All the big brands now are racing to catch up to people like Amy Powney, from LVMH to Zara .

If it wasn't for people like Amy, I'm not sure this would be happening in these big brands.

[Chloe] When I think back on everything that we've done, I do feel really proud.

It just feels a bit magical that we got to that place.

[Amy] It was just about making some sustainable clothing originally, and now it's so much bigger than that.

It's Amy.

[door buzzer] Hi.

This London Fashion Week, instead of doing a conventional fashion show, we are having a one off event called Fashion Our Future.

It's all about getting the fashion industry together to make a pledge for a year and change their shopping habits.

You just take a picture of yourself, and then you basically put our sticker over it, which is Fashion Our Future, and you make one pledge and you nominate someone else.

So we've come up with nine pledges.

[Chloe] It's called Fashion Our Future.

It's a social media campaign we've just launched this weekend to love your wardrobe and the planet at the same time.

- OAP for me.

- OAP.

Amazing.

[Amy] So the OAP pledge stands for Old Age Purchaser.

This is where you buy second hand clothing instead of new, keeping clothes out of landfill, and you pledge to do it for a year.

- Or it can be, like, I'm a fixer and I pledge to always fix my clothes.

[Amy] If you choose the fixer pledge, you choose to mend your clothes instead of buying something new.

You can channel your inner sewing bee and upcycle your wardrobe.

The rent girl pledge, this is where you choose to rent something instead of buying.

Often we buy a dress for an event that ends up in our wardrobes and is never worn again.

So in this case, you could just rent something.

If everyone would do a pledge, that would be amazing.

If you can all nominate somebody else to do one.

- I'm an OAP, pledging to support the circularity of fashion by swapping, borrowing and lending with friends and family.

- I'm pledging to solely purchase from second hand and sustainable clothing brands.

- Rather than rushing out to buy something new, I'm pledging to take better care of what I already have.

- I'm taking the feminist pledge because I believe that women all around the world deserve to be paid fairly when it comes to fashion.

- Hi, I'm Sophie, and I pledge to fix my clothes.

- ...to support brands that put animal welfare... - ... to read the label every single time.

- And I'm pledging not to buy new clothes for one year.

- I'm going to try out renting.

- ...to boycott brands who kill animals for clothes.

[Amy] Sustainability, to me, is not a purchase, it's not about buying an expensive piece of clothing, it's simply a mindset, which means everybody can participate.

- 15.

- 15.

Number here.

Hello.

Oh, yes?

Hello?

Sara and Pedro from Uruguay.

[door buzzer] Thank you!

[Sara] Wow!

- Goodness.

- Hi, Pedro.

How are you?

- Nice to see you.

- Nice to see you.

Welcome to London.

- Thank you very much.

How are you?

- I'm good.

I'm good.

How exciting!

Hello.

How are you, Amy?

- Good.

How are you?

Hi.

- Augustín.

- Hello.

Nice to meet you.

- This is the youngest one.

- Youngest one.

They talked a lot about you.

- Yeah.

[all laugh] - It's the first studio we visit, Pedro and I.

[Amy] Here's one of your fabrics.

So this is 50% your wool.

- That is with wool?

- Yeah, and 50% cotton.

But that's your... your wool.

- Perfect.

- Yeah.

- Cinquenta cinquenta.

- And now this is our most used fabric.

We use it every season.

We change the color.

It's nice, huh?

- It is, definitely.

- Long way from the sheep.

- And I can show you, if we go in there, the finished garments.

[Sara] OK. Wow.

So nice.

[Amy] This one's so beautiful.

[Augustín] Beautiful.

- Lovely.

- And then this one's your wool as well, actually.

[Augustín] Excellent.

[Amy] That's 100% your wool, yeah.

[Pedro] Yeah.

- This is completely amazing for us.

[Amy] This is for you.

- Oh.

Ah, with your fabric.

[Amy] The fabric, yeah.

- Oh.

Oh, Amy.

- Yeah.

- I love it, Amy.

- Ah.

You look beautiful.

- Thank you.

[Pedro] The designer and the model.

- Yes.

[Augustín] Excellent.

- Knowing that is done by you with Uruguayan wool.

[Amy] You know her?

Emma Thompson?

- [Pedro and Sara] Yes.

- She wears your jacket.

- Oh, lovely.

- On the red carpet.

My proudest accomplishment.

I personally traced the fabric's journey from sheep farms run by Pedro in Uruguay.

There you go.

You're in Vogue.

[laughter] [Pedro] To get a designer coming to us, really engaged with the natural fibers.

- Yeah.

- We feel very, very good.

Really, what you are doing is excellent.

- Yeah, but we couldn't do it if we didn't have you.

- Yeah, we cannot do everything.

But we can put our grain of sand.

- Yeah.

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