The Tamesis
Stella McCartney celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Her enduring success can be attributed, in part, to her innate awareness that the Stella woman was not a behemoth. McCartney makes clothes that can take you from a gym class to a morning meeting, or from the airport to a cocktail party, with quick changes in between. Or, maybe, from the boardroom to the school track, which is exactly where McCartney is heading when she talks about her resort collection on FaceTimes, hopping out of her office and getting into her car before pausing to rummage through her handbag. “As soon as I find the car keys, I start driving,” she said with a laugh. (By the way, this tote features a new formula of velvety vegan suede.)
This day-to-night/office-to-nightclub formula may sound like a cliché, but McCartney continually finds new ways to advance it. Among the questions she considered this season—every season, really—were: “What does a woman wear when she is dressed by a woman? How can we truly be loyal servants to the customer in terms of wardrobe?” There were many of her familiar oversized tailorings, but McCartney also experimented with tighter, more body-hugging silhouettes inspired by the softer, more fluid tailoring of her graduation show. There were also sharply tailored velvet suits – a fabric she hadn’t used in “a long time” and which she designed simply because she wanted a new velvet suit in her wardrobe. “I don’t have anything like that, if you can believe it,” she pointed out. “I’ve planned my whole life and you would think I have it all. But that’s not the case, so I’m excited.”
Which leads to the other side of McCartney’s success: She knows her customers because she is her customers. “I love genuinely helping women solve some of their wardrobe challenges,” she says. “I don’t want to go home and change if I don’t have to.” That said, there were some clever one-and-done dresses in bold black and white and vibrant, Anish Kapoor-worthy blues—either draped so that they came to life when stuffed into a suitcase, or embellished with tulle chiffon shoulders or tulle around the neckline, which meant there was no need to dress it up with jewelry. Simple and easy. She has a personal touch throughout, filled with her signature pathos and irreverent humor. See: a collection of adorable lead-free crystal-embellished bags inspired by the light-refracting prisms her mom hung in her window when she was a kid, or a knitted bag with a cheeky “Hi Hi Hi” pattern inspired by the sweaters her dad wore while touring Australia in the ’70s. “I just love the pun,” she said. “I thought it was hilarious.”
But there’s an edge to it all – and a bit of sex appeal. usually take the first male-female The outfit in the lookbook, worn by rising Brazilian star Cailane Oliveira, who also opened her fall show in Paris: she sat in a power pose, her baggy white office shirt unbuttoned, wearing a pair of fine belted leather pants that were, for lack of a better word, “man-spreading.” (Woman spread?) Zoom in, however, and McCartney’s more playful instincts emerge in the whimsical illustrations of British woodland critters that adorn the shirt, which is cut from “forest-friendly” traceable viscose. “She’s really attractive,” McCartney said of the woman, laughing.
On the topic of “forest-friendly”: After introducing a long list of new sustainable materials in her last runway collection, from cruelty-free feathers to CO2-absorbing denim, she likes to use the resort collection to expand and refine how she uses them. “You never really feel like you’ve finished a collection,” she said. “Every season, I think: If you’re not perfecting what you do, why are you doing it?? “What’s the latest innovation she’s trying to adapt? How to deal with slow-moving items in a wider range of categories, including knitwear and silks. She’ll only do that if there’s enough fabric to go into full production, though. “If they can’t go from sample to manufacturing, then to me it’s not considered slow-moving,” she points out.
Delightfully deadstock pieces like the kaleidoscopic garter scarf are among the most delightful pieces in the collection. “Because this collection is launching during Stella-bration season,” she said of her 25th anniversary, “I wanted it to have a more celebratory feel.” McCartney knows better than anyone that sustainable fashion is serious business, which is why she has so much fun with it.
