Fash­ion Reimagined

The world of clothes is famous­ly cut­throat and increas­ing­ly care­less – the dev­il could cur­rent­ly wear most brands quite hap­pi­ly, giv­en the envi­ron­men­tal and human­i­tar­i­an cost of pro­duc­ing pret­ty much any­thing. In Fash­ion Reimag­ined, self-styled upstart design­er Amy Powney takes on glob­al chains of pro­duc­tion as she sets out to make an entire­ly sus­tain­able col­lec­tion after win­ning the BFC/​Vogue Fash­ion Fund prize in 2017.

Becky Hutner’s doc­u­men­tary charts this process, shad­ow­ing Powney and her team as they search the globe for fibres pro­duced humane­ly, that can be spun and woven with­out leav­ing giant car­bon foot­prints. They vis­it Uruguay, Peru, Turkey and Aus­tria, meet­ing wool pro­duc­ers and cot­ton pick­ers, hang out with sheep and those much cuter shear­able rumi­nants, alpacas.

Powney’s jour­ney expos­es how lit­tle aware­ness there is about the lives our clothes have led before we come to wear them, or their extreme­ly con­vo­lut­ed con­struc­tion. Den­im wash­ing is explored, as well as Jacquard weav­ing and var­i­ous oth­er process­es requir­ing sub­stan­tial skill and labour. Rich colours and beau­ti­ful cam­er­a­work unrav­el ​‘how-it-works’ mys­ter­ies that make this tech­nol­o­gy-cen­tred footage a delight to watch, redeem­ing the over­stretched moments of ​‘uhhm-ing’ and ​‘ahh-ing’ about whether the mis­sion will sink or swim.

Powney’s diver­gence as a design­er raised by activists – inter­est­ing on the first and sec­ond men­tion – is also leant on a lit­tle heav­i­ly, and the parts which explore the prac­ti­cal pro­duc­tion of clothes are far more engag­ing than the fash­ion-world non-chat (beyond that reveal­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty of sell­ing what is vir­tu­ous but expen­sive) which dilute the doc­u­men­tary. But it still pro­vides edi­fy­ing insights into the absur­di­ty of cur­rent mate­r­i­al sys­tems, and hope in the proof that these can be suc­cess­ful­ly and sus­tain­ably devi­at­ed from.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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