Amy Powney: Vocal Advocate for Sustainable Fashion

Amy Powney is a renegade of fashion. A designer, creative director and a force for change in a trade that she describes as broken. Shaped by circumstance, her ambition is to create beautiful ‘last skins’ that empower women, while caring for the creatures, people and places touched by the garment trade. She describes her empathy driven practice as regenerative, asking of each step, from field to finished garment, “what would nature do?”

Amy’s childhood was one of subsistence, drowning in nature on an off-grid smallholding, but craving the trimmings of what the world beyond her static home described as the norm. “We couldn't just flick a switch, and the lights would come on,” Amy tells a gaggle of Finisterre people, after a dip at Trevaunance Cove. “I couldn't watch TV unless it was windy, and the only way to have a shower was if we went to the well, pumped water, heated it up and threw the bucket over our heads."  

This alternative upbringing made her an outsider among her peers, but an obsession with fashion became her armour against the bullies and a childhood of making do: "That's what's so lovely about making clothes... you get to choose that last layer... that's the layer you can control". It was her first rebellion.  

Beyond the Dales, studying fashion at university, Amy explored the vanguard of thinkers questioning capitalism and its engine of mass consumption. “The conversation was very much about fair trade in the activist space,” she remembers - Naomi Klein's "No Logo" her window into fashion's true cost on people and planet. The modus operandi of a rebel is to fix perceived problems and Amy’s new fight would be against the lumbering giant of fashion’s supply chain.  

Amy began sweeping the cutting room floor of the independent label, Mother of Pearl but quickly rose to the post of creative director. From this position of power she set the house on a path of sustainability and ethical business practice and in 2017 won best new designer at the Vogue Awards. Now armed with a handsome financial prize she had the means to create her dream collection, centred around the principals of social responsibility, respect for animals and low-environmental impact. It was the birth of No Frills. 

No Frills showed it was possible to create beautiful garments that were organic, ethical and traceable, but this achievement also proved a poison chalice – rather than being a road map for others it made Amy the “poster girl” of sustainable fashion. “I wasn’t the inspiration. I was the answer,” remembers Amy, the emotional toll so immense that when an interviewer asked what she would do next to fix the industry she burst into tears - “the weight of the world on my shoulders was so real." But from anger and depression came clarity and as well as imagining a new approach centred on regenerative thinking Amy created her own label AKYN. She could now share her voice and expertise on a wider scale to generate meaningful change in the industry.

Today, Amy's collaboration with Finisterre represents an evolution of her rebellion, creating a capsule collection that blends technical innovation with understated and versatile style to transcend the spaces and places between the city and the great outdoors. "There's something so beautiful about this collection, that actually, you can be all of those people" she says, admitting that the collection has even reawakened the country girl in her. It is an embodiment of her belief that sustainable fashion shouldn't require you to choose between your values and your lifestyle.