🐑 A Sack Full of Wool

Hi!  👋

In the House of Lords there's a seat that isn't really a seat, it's more like a giant cushion. 

It's square, made of decadent red cloth, large enough to lie down on, and is located at the very front of the chamber with no back and no arms. It is where the Lord Speaker sits today, in the middle of debates, on something that looks like a sofa.

It's called the Woolsack, and it's been there since the fourteenth century. Edward III ordered for it to be made as he wanted his Lord Chancellor to sit on it while making decisions of state: on an actual bale of wool. At that time, wool was the wealth of England. It was the very thing the country sold that kept the economy and the king’s wars running. He wanted the source of that wealth to prop up the men who were making decisions about it, literally, so they couldn't forget where their wealth came from.

It's a good idea, let the weight of its presence come up through the cushion while you decide what to do.

In 1938, they opened the Woolsack up, for repair or for cleaning, we’re not entirely sure. But inside, instead of wool, they found horsehair.

Nobody knows when the wool went out and the horsehair went in. There's no record of the swap, it just happened, quietly, one day over however many years. Ever since, nobody in the room knew, because from the outside a stuffed cushion is a stuffed cushion. 

It took someone to actually cut it open to find out what was really inside.

They then restuffed it properly, with wool from across the British Isles and from fifteen Commonwealth countries, supplied through the International Wool Secretariat. The Lord Speaker still sits on it. But it took six hundred years and an accident of maintenance for anyone to check.

Funny, even the halls of power have the same experiences we do. The gap in knowing what we use, what it’s made of, and where that material comes from is ever widening. Do you know what the cushion you’re sitting on is made of and where that came from?

Please permit me to go on a bit of a tangent, let me tell you about Amy Powney.

She grew up in a caravan on off-grid land in rural Lancashire, as her parents built a house around her. The house had no mains water; her father sank a well, and she'd pump it by hand and heat it on a fire before anyone could wash. Electricity would eventually come later, from a small wind turbine, and in her own words; "I couldn't watch TV unless it was windy." She was teased at school for wearing hand-me-downs with no branded logos. 

Amy studied fashion at Kingston, graduated in 2006, and joined the label Mother of Pearl the same year, sweeping floors and cutting fabric before eventually becoming its creative director in 2015.

In 2017, she won a share of the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, a prize built to grow a label with more collections, more reach, and more credibility. But Amy took the money and decided to walk in a different direction. She began looking for where her clothes actually came from. She went back through the factories to the raw fibre itself. She found wool from Uruguay, alpaca from the Peruvian Andes, and cotton from Turkey. Interestingly, some factories would prefer to drop her as a customer rather than open their books and show where their materials came from. Along her journey she found deforestation and modern slavery: the kind of things that stay hidden because nobody goes there and looks.

In Uruguay she met a farmer called Pedro Otegui, ‘the grandfather of Uruguayan wool’ and a kinship grew. Once she knew how many hands had touched the fabric and what it costs to make, she felt tremendous respect and responsibility. It took about three years to trace the whole journey and change her business around it. 

The result of that research was a collection called No Frills, shown at London Fashion Week in 2018, which became the label's core line from then on.She's since left to start her own brand, called AKYN, with the tagline Soil Not Oil. “It's progress, not perfection,” she says, adding “if the caravan kid can do this, anyone can”.

These two stories aren’t actually about wool, but what you find when you cut things open and look. Most of us are responsible for something and assume it's what we think it is. But what if it’s not? 

What would happen if you took a walk back down the chain? Like the way Amy went to a field in Uruguay, where the wool comes off the sheep smelling of lanolin and weather, heavy and greasy in her hands before anyone's touched it with a machine. What would that feel and smell like? How much more connected could we become?

Talk soon,

Rob

PS: There's a film about Amy Powney's work, called Fashion Reimagined, directed by Becky Hutner. It follows the journey back down the chain to Uruguay. It's streaming in the UK on NOW TV.