AKYN: A considered choice

Amy Powney has stopped marching to fashion’s clock. “Before I valued like my career and my position,” she says, “and now I just value time.” Her new label, Akyn, is built on the same idea: slow, deliberate, and a provocation; what if a fashion brand gave something back?

Akyn begins with a supply chain. Felted wool coats start as Portuguese merino, and the deep chocolate brown of the Paddington-style duffel is just the colour the sheep came in. Amy calls it working in “a holistic circular regenerative way”. It’s also the long way round, with the ego “fully stripped back”.

Eighteen months in, it’s working. Customers return, reviews land, and her events fill with people who leave feeling “warm and supported”. Akyn is the first label that’s entirely hers, and she’s building its community by inviting people in rather than telling them off. The fabrics are raw and untreated, the silhouettes soft, and Amy is speaking in a manner asks you to lean in.

We met after the school run, swapping drop-off stories before we got anywhere near fashion.

Amy is a founder, a designer and a mum of two, and she’ll tell you doing all three at once is a myth. So how does she do it?

She went from “super career woman” to new parent, and it took six years to recalibrate. The first year felt like “going from like 1,000 miles an hour to like 1 mile an hour”. What came out of it was a shift in priorities. She took time off with the kids and left her team to it, which was “not what I’d ever normally do”. Her reasoning is hard to argue with. “They’re growing up like I can’t just wait till they’re teenagers and go whoops I didn’t spend any time with them, you know.”

New priorities have given way to new perspectives.

“Things that were important to me back then are not important to me now. And actually I see the fashion world very differently than I did before. [...] My number one priority is the protection of my children. And so actually when I see fashion just feel more dystopian than ever, it feels wrong.”

We have just come off the show season where over 300 designers shows across the big four fashion cities. Amy has no patience for brands selling escapism.

“We’re not in a world anymore where you can just hide behind saying that you’re selling a dream and that you don’t care about actually the nightmare that’s underneath it. [...] Then it’s not a dream. It’s a fake reality and it’s smoke and mirrors.”

I asked whether she ever feels like she’s doing this on her own.

“It’s a very negative answer, a few years ago there was a big shift and a big change and it felt really positive and the momentum was building. [...] I think it’s really cast a very clear light on those remaining that are doing it for all the right reasons.”

She calls herself an “accidental activist”. When Fashion Reimagined was released in 2022, the documentary following Amy’s three-year quest to make a fully traceable collection, came out, she was hopeful.

“I was super excited that things are going to change and then sort of 3 years later you’re like why is no one doing it.”

She had already tried every register. Then came her TED talk.

“I learned a lot from them because obviously they are experts in this and they said that they found that solutions sell way better than fear.”

Then she read a line widely attributed to C.S. Lewis.

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”

“I think when I read that, it’s like that was such an important moment for me where I realised I’m not angry by nature. I’m grieving. I’m grieving like for mother nature. I’m grieving for my children. [...] I don’t want to just lean into the anger and the shouting.

A shift in tone, and a reason to start anew.

“I’m a creative and I want to celebrate craft and quality and connection [...] and lead by example rather than tell people off because I was tired of doing it.”

Hence the tees: small, cryptic, quietly provocative: “I wanted someone to lean in and say, ‘What does soil not oil mean?’” Her six-year-old, newly reading, has already asked. The conversation starter knits carry this same energy. Then there are the coats, her favourite thing to design.

Doing it properly is slower, and Amy doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s really hard. You’re immediately thinking about farmers and workers and the planet. It’s a lot more emotional, it's a lot more intense but I think it’s probably the only way to do it or it should be the only way to do it.”

Amy doesn’t do it alone. She has chosen her ‘Kynfolk’; women who cover everything from fibre to feelings, a group of women she connects with to keep her accountable but also to help drive things forward.

“Whether it’s a text message, a phone, or a coffee, it’s a sisterhood.”

I put it to her that a community like this isn’t the same as networking, because nobody is keeping score.

“It’s friendship”, she says, that has simply moved into the workplace, and it rests on something she’d never quite put into words before.

All of which raises the question of who it’s for. Amy has never wanted to tell women what to be, which is why the brand doesn’t carry her name.

So who is the woman who says yes? I asked who Akyn would be at a dinner party. Amy laughed.

Or, more exactly, Amy in a particular moment: she drifts back to a 90s childhood with Prince and Whitney Houston on the radio, when life was “quite worry-free in many ways”.

“She’s just me, maybe prior to burnout.”

Amy does still enjoy partying, only now it’s on a Sunday morning at the front of her local Zumba class, giving it 150%. It’s a fair picture of who Akyn is for: a woman who knows how to let go.

The weekend is phone down, kids in charge.

“They are actually my happiest times because you’re following their lead all the time.”

“You can talk for like 45 minutes with my son who’s obsessed with trains about like the Victoria line. And you know what? Sometimes that’s just like a good escapism.”