Akyn is the chic sustainable fashion brand you’ve been waiting for

In April 2023, Sky Documentaries released Fashion Reimagined, a 100-minute film following the British fashion designer Amy Powney’s attempt to trace the supply chain of the luxury brand where she worked. The film aired in 52 cinemas and was watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Powney was subsequently invited to give a TED talk in Detroit. Subject: “How to Fix Fashion and Protect the Planet”. Al Gore gave the opening address; more than 700,000 people watched her speech online.

Powney, 40, had high hopes for the film, convinced it would force the fashion industry to face up to its ethically dubious and environmentally damaging practices, and change. “I was so excited,” she recalls, from a studio in London. “I thought everyone would see it and want to do something.”

That didn’t happen. “No one did anything — they just asked me to fix it. I honestly felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders.” In August 2024 she was speaking on a panel when an audience member asked her what was next in her plan to save the fashion industry. “I just burst into tears. I was like, I can’t do it on my own, you know?”

You can be natural, organic, but still super-chic

Now Powney has a new proposal: show them how it’s done. After 19 years at Mother of Pearl, the brand founded in 2002 by Maia Norman, at which Powney worked her way from fabric cutter to creative director, while attempting to convert it into a sustainable label, she is going it alone with Akyn.

She aims for it to be a case study for eco excellence. Unlike so many other green outfits, however, these clothes don’t look granola. Founded on “elevated wardrobe staples” — classic styles in rich fabrics that have a touch of quirk via a gold fastening that looks like a pebble, say, or a sleeve that is unexpectedly embellished — Akyn is priced more accessibly than most luxury brands. Powney holds up a fawn-coloured collarless blazer (£650) in undyed merino wool with a bio-resin button. “This jacket is the perfect example of how you can be natural, organic, sustainable, but also super-chic. That’s my ultimate vision — to not compromise on creating a beautiful product but just to do it in the best way possible.”

There are also streamlined blazers (£650), slouchy jeans (£240), fluid dresses (£320) and plush cable knitwear (£420). And the pearl-trimmed coats that were a Mother of Pearl bestseller: Powney bought back her intellectual property and customer database when she left the brand.

“Amy is the only one doing this,” says Jane Shepherdson, the influential former brand director at Topshop who is now the chair of clothing rental company My Wardrobe HQ. “When people ask me which fashion brands are both environmentally and socially responsible, and design great collections, she is the only one I can name.”

Approximately 90 per cent of the collection is made from four natural fibres: organic or regenerative cotton, wool, European flax and Tencel lyocell made with wood pulp, all of which are certified by independent organisations. The majority of the clothes are made in factories that Powney has personally visited and audited, with a view to manufacturing close to the fabric-producing mills to simplify the supply chain: cotton jersey, merino wool tailoring and denim in Portugal and knitwear in east Asia (she is looking into an alternative but “they’re the best at knitwear”).

At a time when other fashion businesses are quietly scaling back green initiatives, no detail has escaped Powney’s attention, from the seaweed-paper swing tags to the board of advisers that includes Stella McCartney’s former sustainability and innovation director Claire Bergkamp, now CEO at Textile Exchange, and Joycelyn Longdon, an environmental justice researcher. Powney is undergoing the application process for B Corp certification; her next area for improvement is trimmings that are typically cheaply made in bulk (some of those pearls are recycled plastic, which annoys her).

I want to lead by example, not call stuff out

Powney admits there is no simple answer to solving fashion’s contribution to climate change. She can talk at length about her problem with fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles (“you’re essentially just taking plastic, turning it into a fibre, and as long as that’s in fast fashion, it’s just going straight to landfill. Also, you have a massive micro-shedding issue”) or blockchain technology (“all this data is stored on huge servers that are fuelled by fossil fuels”). But the question persists: with 100 billion garments made every year — of which the UK sends 336,000 tonnes to landfill or incineration annually — why make more clothes that nobody needs?

Merino wool-mix Zelia cardigan, £360

Organic-cotton Adria T-shirt, £125

“It’s a really good question,” says Powney. “I grapple with it all the time. If you don’t have a seat at the table, you can’t make a change; but if you carry on, you’re also part of the problem.” She pauses. “I don’t know if I have the ultimate answer, but the main reason is: nobody has scaled a brand and done it in the right way. And if it’s not me, who is gonna do it? I’ve thought, I’ll just step out for a bit, I’ll go and do gardening for a living. But then I watch it all carry on.”

Claire Bergkamp, who sits on Akyn’s advisory board, thinks the brand has agenda-setting potential. “What makes Amy unique is her refusal to accept ‘no’; she is unwavering in her commitment to challenging the status quo in fashion,” she says. “She has taken the time to understand deeply the supply systems behind the industry, engaging with them directly in ways few designers ever do.”

Profiles of Powney often focus on her off-grid childhood as the genesis of her eco impulses. Between the ages of 11 and 16, she lived with her parents and older sister in a field in Lancashire. It was anything but arcadian. The Powney girls walked 50 minutes to school down dirt tracks in all weathers, then came home to an unheated caravan with no hot water or electricity. 

“My parents had no money. It was pretty brutal,” she says. But the experience gave her “a deep-rooted respect” for natural resources. “Most people spend their life just switching on the light switch, turning the TV on — zero questions asked,” she says. It also made her more determined to escape to the city. “Where we came from, people didn’t make it in London as a designer. I was like, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Wool Chanah coat, £890

Organic cotton Denim Sol jeans, £240

Her activist spirit was awakened as a fashion student at Kingston University when, prompted by the Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s Make Trade Fair wristbands, she learnt about ethical trading standards. Then she read Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Her graduate collection was an earnest attempt to counteract the sweatshops and environmental destruction Klein identified as the hallmarks of consumerism and featured mainly wool from a British alpaca farm. Powney’s cohort was nonplussed. “My tutor was like, what the bloody hell are you going on about? I think I was just annoying everyone.” After graduating, she joined Mother of Pearl.

The Akyn headquarters are in a draughty building on an unglamorous trading estate in Mile End. Powney’s team numbers five, but she is hiring five more. She is self-funding the business with the proceeds from previous projects, collaborations — a link-up with Cornish surfwear brand Finisterre is in the works — and pre-orders from a select group of wholesalers that includes Liberty, with which Akyn will launch exclusively in May, in addition to its own website. She is seeking long-term investment. “There is something scary about launching independently, but also something really liberating — it means I can do it in my own way.” She credits regular Zumba classes and no-phone weekends at soft play with her two young children with keeping her grounded.

What has Powney learnt from her years of activism? “I have realised that people don’t respond to being told off. I just want to lead by example rather than calling stuff out,” she says. Which explains why Akyn’s slogan T-shirts feature lines such as “Soil not oil” in stitching no more than a centimetre high. “It’s subtle, not shouty,” she says. “I don’t want to scream at people. The whole point is that they are conversation starters. I’m still trying to get my message across, but in a beautiful, emotional, loving way.”