The designer is directing her fashion nous toward a new collection for John Lewis. Even Before Corona, Amy Powney, the 36-year-old creative director of the slightly kooky, much-loved London label Mother of Pearl, was a designer for our times.
Self-isolation? The Powney family – Amy, her parents and sister – were doing a version of it in the late 1980s, living in a caravan in Lancashire in the middle of nowhere.
This was the truly remote life, without TV, or, quite a lot of the time, heating. ‘When you have to wind up the electricity, you think a lot more carefully about how you use it,’ she recalls. ‘Is this a meal that’s going to take 15 minutes of gas, or 30?