How Amy Powney built Mother of Pearl into the brand women want to wear

Feedback can come from the most unexpected sources. ‘Once a guy came up to me in the street and said, “Your shoes are so ugly, I need a painkiller to look at them.” I made him say it again on video – here, see?’ says Amy Powney, the creative director of Mother of Pearl, shaking with laughter as she scrolls through her iPhone to find the clip. And yup, there he is, unwittingly insulting the woman who designed those (incidentally, very cool) shoes. ‘I thought it was a brilliant compliment because Mother of Pearl isn’t a sexy brand. It’s cool and it’s beautiful, but it really is women dressing for women.’ 

Amy, 32, is an east Londoner by way of Lancashire. Wavy-haired with a ready laugh, she’s also a serious businesswoman, having done almost every job at Mother of Pearl since she joined Maia Norman’s young brand as an assistant in 2006. Now, some 11 years later and firmly in charge, she has crystallised the brand’s aesthetic as ‘something sporty, something girlie and something granny. It’s serious fashion not to be worn too seriously.’

That comes through in the tracksuit bottoms with pearl detailing, the floral prints (like something you’d have seen on your grandmother’s sofa, circa 1978) and frills a go-go – design signatures that a growing segment of the fashion-buying population can’t get enough of. Vogue is a fan too, having crowned Mother Of Pearl as a co-winner of the 2017 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award, which came with ￡100,000 in funding plus mentorship. ‘The first interview was the scariest,’ Amy says. ‘Like Dragons’ Den with fashion people.’ 

Take a closer look, and you’ll start spotting MoP’s ruffled, pearl-studded shoulders all over town (tastemakers Eva Chen, Caroline Issa and Susanna Lau are fans). There were more than a few in the audience at the brand’s recent London Fashion Week show, a seated salon-style presentation and breakfast at The Ned hotel. Models wended between the tables in lavish brocade dresses over narrow, flared trousers; winter floral two-pieces; and palest-pink knit jumpers and trousers. Many clutched under their arms not handbags but frilled cushions from the new MoP interiors collection, a flourish inspired by Amy’s recent home renovation.

Since the show marked the brand’s first season as a see-now-buy-now player, all of it was available online right away – and in the crush of women waiting for a lift, I spotted at least three tapping on to the site for a bit of instant gratification. Naturally, Amy describes this operations shift as a simple, pro-customer decision. ‘It just makes so much sense to say, “Hey, look at what we’ve just done, and you can shop it if you want.”’

Amy’s early years couldn’t have been further removed from MoP’s industrious, white-walled studio. She grew up in the village of Hesketh Bank, sandwiched between Preston and Southport. When she was 10, her parents uprooted Amy and her 12-year-old sister from their ‘normal’ home to build a house from scratch in the country.

‘It was off the grid, so no electricity, no water, no gas, no nothing,’ she recalls. ‘To wash yourself, you had to pump water then heat it up on a tiny gas stove.’ Weekends were spent digging wells and pitching in on construction. ‘I remember at one point Dad wanted to reclaim all the bricks from an old barn, so we sat there and chipped off the  old bits of cement together.’

Clockwise from left: dress, ￡495;  red jumper, ￡295; jumpsuit, ￡595;  mules, ￡295; Brocade boots, ￡350, all motherofpearl.co.uk

The adventure wore thin after a few years – ‘it wasn’t so cool at school being the gypsy who lived in the middle of nowhere’ – but ‘in hindsight it was so brilliant’, Amy says. ‘I’m glad we had that to shape our lives.’ The remove gave her a unique vantage point from which to observe teenage status-jockeying through clothes. 

She took this perspective to design school in London and into an internship with Giles Deacon, where initially she underplayed her upbringing to fit in. ‘For years I thought I had to not be where I came from, which fundamentally meant that my work was never really true.’ Gaining confidence and responsibility over her years at MoP made all the difference. ‘Now I just think that enjoying my background and taking the humour out of it, and bringing it to what we do, is how I’ve made it all connect.’

It’s unusual to find a creative director who so aligns with the profile of a typical customer (usually it’s founders, like the Mansur Gavriel girls, Roksanda Ilin?i? or Maryam Nassir Zadeh, who come across as their brands’ best embodiments) but Amy is the MoP woman, inhabiting the brand’s dresses and her workday uniform (a custom boiler suit with pearl bars at the ankles) with flair.

She recently married Nick Prendiville, a visual merchandiser, in a thoroughly MoP-ified wedding. There were menus and place cards from the brand’s collaboration with Papier, floral arrangements that looked like they’d leapt out of one of its prints, and, of course, a custom guipure-lace gown in a high-necked, trailing, Pre-Raphaelite silhouette. Her team hand-sewed every stitch, she says – ‘like MoP couture’. 

The guests included friends such as chef and cookery writer Anna Barnett, all east-London types who have wardrobes full of the label’s floral dresses and extended-sleeve jumpers. ‘When my girlfriends have got it on and wear it with their own style, it’s just so nice to see,’ Amy says. But she seems most moved by spotting complete strangers in her designs. ‘It’s one of the top rewards you can have, to see that an actual person has purchased something you’ve designed. Like, they’ve invested in that. It’s the number-one source of affirmation you can get to know that you’re doing something good.’ 

Now that the wedding is behind her,  Amy is focusing on a studio move, her next collection and settling into her freshly renovated house in Walthamstow. It was  a two-year project to extend and restore it, during which time she had to develop her ability to compromise. ‘My husband is really minimal – I just think we need more colour and more print everywhere, and he wants everything to be black and white.’ In the end, the decor includes dining chairs covered in House of Hackney ‘Palmeral’ fabric, a velvet sofa and an enormous poster of a Dutch floral still-life, so you can guess who won that one.

You might think she’d be ready for a rest, yet she admits, ‘Last night I said to [Nick], maybe in 10 years we could do an amazing country house somewhere and move out. Every time I finish one thing I’m on to the next.’ With the rest of us following, pearly shoes and all.