Approaching the subject with dynamic optimism, Becky Hutner’s new documentary following the work of Amy Powney, creative director for luxury fashion brand Mother of Pearl, makes environmental industry change look easy… maybe a little too easy.
★★★★✰
This unbridled optimism with which Hutner wants to approach the rather depressing, existential subject of environmental action is apparent from the get go: the film starts at the British Fashion Council (BFC)/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund 2017 awards ceremony, where Amy Powney wins the cash prize for the company Mother of Pearl. It’s a roaring start to the journey she wishes to take with the money, to change the industry’s approach to environmentalism, one garment at a time. With the solution to climate change being an entire change of lifestyle, optimism of this kind is fundamental to progress Fashion Reimagined focuses a lot more on the solution than the problem. However, to solve a global issue you need global change, a universality that neither BFC or Vogue are known for—just one of the many signs of an elitist approach that salts the otherwise sweet apples of empowerment that the doc has to offer.
Unlike other figure-focused documentaries, Fashion Reimagined doesn’t use the typical dual-narrative of the art and the artist. That being said, we definitely get a sense of the designer’s humble beginnings. As a child living in a caravan in the rural North of England, Powney grew up obsessed with fashion, while also living a life of extreme environmentalism (her father recalls bathing her by running around the caravan with hot water and a bucket to save on water wastage). The doc follows present-day (technically 2018) Powney as she uses the Fashion Fund money to plan her new environmentally friendly season for Mother of Pearl: ‘No Frills’. This proves a difficult task, with her brief limiting things like air miles, chemical usage, and ignorance of any source of fabric.
Hutner rides this optimism fairly consistently throughout the film, adopting a light-hearted tone throughout. This, along with the focus on Powney’s adventurous project in lieu of the damning issues that motivated it, depicts the climate crisis in a very different light than has previously been seen. With this light-heartedness, arguably, comes accessibility. We are not being pointed towards the impending doom that our actions have caused, instead being shown the work that is possible, and is in many cases already being done, to alleviate the problem. The approach is inspiring rather than burdensome to our everyday life. Whether this was intentional as a form of message relay on Hutner or even Powney’s part is one thing, but the resulting film certainly feels like an easy, guilt-free way into solving the issues of climate change.
However, it is worth mentioning again that this feeling of accessibility and inspiration is purely on a formal level; there is still the glaring fact that, as Powney admits herself, Mother of Pearl is a luxury fashion brand. It often feels like an elitist approach to climate justice, given that not much time is spent dwelling on, for example, where the money came from to acquire a new central London studio for this project. Of course, for a documentary about fashion, this one of many things that can rely on assumptions, but in terms of having a classically moral, Brechtian message—helped enormously by the final frame, a photo of child-Powney looking very triumphant over an inspirational quote from Anne Klein—Fashion Reimagined contradicts itself by tunnel-visioning on what is quite an apotheotic situation. This may have been helped by running the classic dual narrative mentioned earlier, finding human commonality between the average cinemagoer and a leading fashion designer. But of course with a different approach, other things would have been lost.
This is not to say that the film owes anything to this sort of message. After all, this is a fashion documentary, so the ideas surrounding a solution to climate change will adhere to the conventions of the fashion world. What’s more, given how enormously it contributes to climate change—as pointed out frequently in the doc—focusing on this industry is critical. In a way, trying to avoid realities like elitism in fashion through fiction would’ve felt wrong; one thing the film does well in terms of this disjunction between the necessary universality of climate action and the exclusivity of the fashion industry is just by being a documentary, directly cutting through this veil. The rather objective, not particularly stylised aesthetic, helps to alleviate any artistic shrouding of the urgent matter at hand.
Some way through, when Powney is in South America sourcing wool, a sustainable manufacturer (the one she ends up using for the line), says of climate action that “we must all row in the same direction”. This doc both criticises the industry and shows what it, and we as consumers, can do to help in the fight against climate change, all under the umbrella of an optimism for a brighter, clearer future.
The Verdict
Fashion Reimagined is an insight into what people at the top of an industry that contributes a large majority of greenhouse gases are doing to fight climate change, acting as a glimmer of hope that, although only in the higher circles at the moment, the future of sustainability in fashion looks bright.
Words by Oisín McGilloway
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