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PHOTOGRAP BY MARK C O’FLAHERTY/CAMERA PRESS, GETTY IMAGES, PA PHOTOS, GOFF PHOTOS. STILL LIFE BY NOHALIDEDIGITAL.COM
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Fashion first
stopping them releasing the right
nutrients back into the food chain as
they’re meant to.
So what immediate changes
did you make?
I tried to make our denim from
organic cotton, but we couldn’t
even find any. Then I did a speech
in New York in about 1990, saying
there was an untenable situation
going on in fashion with garment
workers in conditions of slavery as
well as the pollution from textile
agriculture, but the media just wasn’t
interested at the time.
What other issues in fashion
production concern you?
Leather is a huge problem. The
chemical ‘chromium’ used in
tanning and dyeing leather becomes
even more toxic in landfill. It strips
calcium from the locals’ bodies if it
gets into the water supply. I’ve heard
stories of old ladies with such fragile
bones they’ve been broken by the
weight of a sheet. But when I went
to a trade fair recently, we only
found one usable vegetable
tanned leather. There was
nothing else that was beautiful
enough to use.
What can be done to
improve the situation?
We need to stop making new and
come up with solutions for how to
reuse difficult-to-upcycle plastic
fibres instead of dumping or burning
them. The problem is, in England we
don’t sort our rubbish properly – in
Germany, they’ve got five or six bins
per household, and we’ve got three.
Rubbish is best recycled at source
and it should be washed as well.
The Chinese have prioritised that
technology, so we’re just shipping
our rubbish off to them to recycle
and make money out of it. Even the
carbon footprint of exporting our
rubbish is shameful.
How would you describe your
style these days?
Everything’s got to be functional and
comfortable, but stylish and
contemporary. Clothes are crazy
because they’re about playing a role.
A really beautiful garment has a
presence and a life in it that
transforms you. nWhat were you like in your early
years as a designer?
I set up a business after leaving
college in 1969. We couldn’t think
what to call it, so we mixed a friend’s
name, Buck, with Hamnett, and
called it Tuttabankem, which was
terrible. There was a Tutankhamun
exhibition on at the British Museum
at the time and we kept getting calls
asking what time it opened.
And what was your style like
when you first started out?
It was the time of Zandra Rhodes and
Thea Porter, and I did a bit of the
hippie look, you know, hand-
embroidered leather. It was quite
chic and grown up. I founded my
label Katharine Hamnett in 1979.
So when did environmental
consciousness dawn?
My best friend Lynne Franks [iconic
fashion PR, and inspiration for TV’s
Ab Fa b] was, and still is, a Buddhist.
I’m not really. I’m terrible because
I drink and smoke, but I like the
philosophy, and in about 1989
I thought I’d just check ‘right
livelihood’, the Buddhist path
which means living without
harming any living things. So
I asked one of my staff to do
some research into the
environmental impact of the
clothing industry.
And what did you discover
when they reported back?
I was so naive at that point. I
thought it would all be fine. Then it
was just shock after shock. Deaths
from pesticide poisoning, cotton
farmers living in poverty, the rivers
and seas being contaminated with
pesticides... I thought, ‘My God,
we’ve got to do something about this
because nobody knows!’
What aspect of the production
process shocked you the most?
Cotton is a huge issue – there are
massive greenhouse gas emissions
contributing to global warming
coming from conventional cotton
agriculture, and the pesticides and
herbicides that are used are so toxic,
polluting water supplies. They’re so
persistent, they end up in the rivers
and seas as this toxic slime, probably
being taken up by plants andT-shirt, £130
Getting her
message
across in 2017
(bottom) and
to Margaret
Thatcher in
1984 (below)Hamnett in 1983, far right
Jacket,
£330Skirt,
£390Sweater,
£315Alexa Chung wears
Katharine Hamnett
at LFW (left)SS04
Lily Cole
in Hamnet’s
campaign
tee for the
Environmental
Justice
Foundation in
2009 (right)