Rebel With A Cause: Meet AKYN Founder Amy Powney

With her new label, AKYN, designer and activist Amy Powney is rewriting fashion’s rules and the industry should pay close attention, says Tiffanie Darke.

Amy Powney On The Creation Of AKYN

With her new label, AKYN, designer and activist Amy Powney is taking everything she’s learned – from a childhood lived off-grid to fashion’s front row – and rewriting the rules. Grounded in circularity and community, her vision goes far beyond style: it’s a bold blueprint for a regenerative future, where clothes are made with conscience, and worn with intent.

Amy Powney (c) Trisha Ward

Three years ago, with a nine-month-old baby under her arm, Powney changed the view of an industry. With a raw and penetrating film, Fashion Reimagined, she documented her journey to create a capsule collection from just three natural fabrics – cotton, wool and denim. Tracing her supply chains back to the root took her to Uruguay, Turkey and Austria, and the global complexity of the challenge opened the eyes of all who saw it. In the wake of Covid, everyone then began to ask the same questions.

But the moment she finished the film, Powney already knew she wanted to do more. ‘That journey was essentially me going, this is how we do fashion, can I do it better? But all I did was replicate the same system.’ The resulting collection for her erstwhile brand, Mother of Pearl, was not ambitious enough. Her new brand, AKYN, is the sum of everything she has learned since then – about design, fabrics, manufacturing, and about community and process. ‘I realised circularity had to be the approach. Circularity isn’t just reselling or repairing, it’s a whole idea – how you’re growing your crops in a regenerative way, how you are managing your factories from renewable energies, how you’re managing waste streams, how you are giving to your staff and your community and creating this entire business model where you’re putting people, planet and profit all into the equation.’

Powney is a radical, and that is a rare beast in fashion these days. AKYN begins with a tight, minimalist collection of hero pieces, with design echoes from Mother of Pearl. But its vision is to prove to the industry that circularity, conscience and responsibility can be intrinsic to the process.

Powney’s entry into the fashion world was not textbook. She grew up off-grid, living in a caravan in a field in Lancashire, with her dad pouring buckets of water through the roof so his two daughters could take showers. ‘My passion for fashion came out of the bullying I got from not being able to fit in,’ she says. ‘Because my visual appearance reflected my financial background. At that time in the nineties it was the sports era – logos, three-stripe tracksuits, Spice Girls. I got obsessed with having to have that because I wanted to fit in. But that journey gave me understanding. Most kids don’t question where electricity or food comes from – things just arrive, switches get pressed. I had to live through the hardship of where water came from, which was a well in our ground. We could only turn on the television if there was wind outside, because that’s how we got our electricity. It gave me a very deep, raw experience of resources and a base respect that I’ve never lost. Every time I switch my heater on, I still think about what it’s like not to have that. I’m so appreciative of those things.’

After school, Powney enrolled at Central Saint Martins and got her first job as an assistant at Mother of Pearl. The small size of the label allowed her to get involved with everything, and as she worked her way up, to evolve the minimalist design aesthetic that has become her trademark. Transitioning her work at Mother of Pearl into AKYN has given her a new freedom, allowing her not only to hone in on her circular vision, but to invent her own brand and design from the ground up.

Her understanding of clothing is forged in the fire of her own experience, as a mother, as a partner, as a designer, as a CEO, as an activist (watch her thrilling TED talk) and now as a founder. ‘Women have so many different shades to who they are. We are mothers, we are children of mothers, we are career women, we are sometimes having to be boss bitch, sometimes maternal, nurturing human beings. We have days where we’re deeply rooted and connected and other days we’re in a frenzy.’

Anyone who has worn Mother of Pearl knows the design team understands this. We don’t have time to think most mornings – we just need to put something on that signals our values and our mood and will also practically and comfortably get us through the day. And yet clothes are everything to us. Our confidence, our personality, our attitude, our intellect. ‘Women don’t need me to make them who they are. Their best skin is their own skin and I just need to give them something that makes them not feel like everybody else. To make them feel the best that they possibly can.’

And so the Elsie jacket and trousers in 100 percent wool is the kind of suit that will last in your wardrobe for decades. Made from Portugal’s merino sheep, it is undyed and woven in a local mill, then cut and sewn there too. The jacket is fitted, but with an interesting cocoon sleeve and oversized button detail. Just enough edge to get you noticed. The slouchy trousers are inspired by menswear with pleats down the front, and a 100 percent organic cotton waistband (most are polyester).

You will find a pearl shoulder on a long Tencel robe that shapes to the body like a dress. There is easy denim and fluid black and navy dresses that will take you through the day and out into the night. Sweatshirts and t-shirts have been added as entry points (discreet slogans, ‘Soil not oil’ and ‘Girl Moss’, signal AKYN’s magic and intent). ‘There’s nothing plastic except in the trimmings. Part of my work is embracing new tech and innovation. Where I stand today on regenerative fibres and not using synthetics – maybe in five years we will have solutions.’ Tiny percentages of elastane or recycled nylon have been added to some of the garments to give longevity and performance, but the balance is creating clothes that last, because these are wardrobe keepers, ones that should march through life with you.

‘It’s progress not perfection,’ says Powney, with the experience and knowledge of taking the hard road for a number of years. ‘We’ve landed the best possible suppliers that use the best possible fibres at the price that we can produce at, at the scale we’re at. But I will never stop my fight to be perfect.’ AKYN comes from ‘kin’, meaning folk. ‘Because it’s not about me. It’s about the girls that work here, the factories we work with. And it’s also about you. I can’t produce if I don’t make things you can wear. We all have to do this together.’

As for process, Powney is ready to take on the industry. ‘I’m trying to find the balance of how to have a regenerative business model and still have a seat at the table. I want to sit with those big CEOs and say we are turning over X and we have achieved Y, and we are using these fibres, we have scaled up and we have all these regenerative business practices. And here’s our sustainability reports, and it can be done.’

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