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From ego to eco
Katharine Hamnett looks back with shame at some aspects of her highly successful career in fashion. Now she’s making up for past errors by repaying her debt to the Earth.
Interview by Marcelle Bernstein
Portraits by Kevin Davies
A light industrial estate in north London is an unlikely place to find the woman who, almost two decades ago, launched a revolution in one of the world’s biggest industries – clothing. There’s a huge white studio full of music, pretty people and racks of bright garments, where Katharine Hamnett sits at a white garden table.
She does not look like a style icon of almost 40 years. The diffident manner cannot possibly belong to anyone who’s been called the high priestess of ethical clothing, the founding mother of politicised fashion. She does not resemble any professor I have ever seen (in her case, of Art and Textiles at Central Saint Martins). She surely cannot be the holder of a bus pass (they must demand ID if ever she uses it). But she is all these things.
She personifies her claim that “Wearing clothes is all in your bearing, it’s about how you stand – you can get away with anything” (a remark she made after being locked out of a hotel room naked and wrapping a rug around herself to go down to reception). She is wearing the briefest red denim skirt (“I’m trying to be invisible today and this is my most invisible skirt”), a big dark V–neck sweater, opaque black tights and slightly grubby white trainers. “I’m a super–active person and I don’t want to be constricted on the physical or psychological level.”
Born in Gravesend, she lived abroad as a child – her father was an embassy defence attaché – and was brought up mainly in Paris, with a gap for Cheltenham Ladies’ College, followed by Central St Martins College of Art and Design. She is tall and slender, with long dark hair, gentle brown eyes and a wide, expressive mouth. All this masks the determination her behaviour demonstrates. In 1989 she became aware of the terrible toll the clothing and textile industry was taking on the environment.
Although she had unknowingly been guilty herself – she had designed fur coats, initiated the craze for stonewashed jeans (using mountains of pumice), and stretch denim (using petrochemicals) – she turned right around and proceeded to fight to promote more ethical and environmentally sympathetic methods of production. “But in those days, nobody wanted to know.”
She battled on until in 2003 she saw for herself how Third World farmers and their families were dying on contaminated land. Cotton is grown on only three per cent of the world’s farmland, but a quarter of all insecticides are used on those fields, including the acutely toxic aldicarb. Many countries employ virtually slave labour. And there are hazards for the wearer, too: corrosive chlorine bleach is used for whiteness when the cotton has been spun. At this point, her clothes were made on licence all over the world.
“I stopped everything I could,” she says. “I was just not prepared to carry on making my wonderful designer salary at the expense of people at the bottom of the supply chain.” She virtually disappeared when she gave up her stores, including the flagship in Sloane Street. “Cutting off your income stream, it’s quite a hole…” So, think the appeal of Birkin and the steel of Rampling. But there the film–star association ends. This is a woman who really does not want to be noticed.
She uses not a smidgeon of make–up. No hairstyling. There is no hovering PR person. No important handbag, mobile, electronic diary. The contradiction is that at the same time, Katharine Hamnett is resolved to be heard. She speaks rapidly in a low voice without undue emphasis, which makes her more extreme statements seem matter–of–fact. And she has made many over the years: the Imperial War Museum wants the original anti–nuclear missile 58% Don’t Want Pershing T–shirt she wore to a reception at No 10. Ms Hamnett is very funny, delivering humour in exactly the same level tone, so you almost miss it (“Margaret Thatcher didn’t notice the T–shirt at first, then she made a noise like a chicken”).
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