Stella McCartney is celebrating 25 years in business this year. Her enduring success can be chalked up, in part, to her innate understanding that the Stella woman is not a monolith. McCartney makes clothes that will take you from a workout class to a morning meeting, or from the airport to a cocktail party with a quick change in between. Or, perhaps, from the boardroom to the school run, which is exactly where McCartney is heading when she FaceTimes to chat about her resort collection, bounding down from her office and into her car, before pausing to root around in her handbag. “I’ll start driving soon—once I can find my car keys,” she said, laughing. (The handbag features a new formulation of velvety vegan suede, by the way.)
That whole day-to-night/office-to-nightclub paradigm may sound like a cliché, but McCartney constantly finds new ways to advance it. The questions she was considering this season—and, really, every season—included: “What does a woman wear when she’s dressed by a woman? How can we really be a kind of loyal servant to our customer in terms of that wardrobe?” There was plenty of her familiar oversized tailoring in the mix, but McCartney also played around with slinkier, more figure-hugging silhouettes inspired by the softer, more liquid cuts of the suits at her graduate show. There were some sharply cut velvet suits in the mix, too—a fabric she hasn’t worked with in “a long time,” and which she designed simply because she wanted a new velvet suit in her own wardrobe. “I don’t have anything like it, if you can believe that,” she noted. “Having designed for what feels like my entire life, you would think I have everything. But not that, so I’m excited.”
Which leads to the flip side of McCartney’s success: She knows her customer, because she is her customer. “I like genuinely helping women solve some of their wardrobe challenges,” she said. “And I don’t want to have to go home and change if I don’t have to.” To wit, there were a handful of clever one-and-done dresses in bold black-and-whites and a vibrant, Anish Kapoor-worthy blue—either draped so that they could spring back to life after being stuffed in a suitcase, or embellished with tufted chiffon shoulders or tulle around the neckline, meaning there’d be no need to style it with jewelry. Easy peasy. She sprinkled personal touches throughout, all with her signature blend of sentimentality and irreverent humor. See: the series of lovely lead-free crystal-embellished bags inspired by the light-refracting prisms her mom would hang in the window when she was a kid, or knits with a cheeky “Hi Hi Hi” motif inspired by a sweater her dad wore while touring Australia in the ’70s. “I just love the double entendre of that,” she said. “I think it’s hilarious.”
But there was also an edge—and a little sexiness—to it all. Take the first, typically masculin-féminin outfit in the lookbook, worn by the rising Brazilian model Cailane Oliveira, who also opened her fall show in Paris: Sitting in a power pose, her loose white office shirt unbuttoned just so, wearing a fabulous pair of belted leather trousers as she, for lack of a better term, “man spreads.” (Woman spreads?) Zoom in, however, and McCartney’s more playful instincts reveal themselves in the whimsical illustration of British woodland critters that decorates the shirt, which is cut from “forest-friendly” traceable viscose. “She’s definitely got a kick to her,” McCartney said of this woman, with a smile.
On the subject of “forest-friendly”: having introduced a long list of new sustainable materials in the last runway collection, from cruelty-free feathers to CO2-absorbing denim, she enjoyed using the resort collection to expand on and refine how she’s using them. “You never truly feel like you’ve finished a collection,” she says. “Each season, I think: Why are you doing it if you’re not perfecting what you do?” The latest innovation she’s attempting to fine-tune? How to work with deadstock in a broader range of categories, including knits and silk. She’ll only do it, though, if there’s enough of the fabric available to go into full production. “If they can’t take it all the way from sample to manufacture, then that doesn’t count as deadstock to me,” she noted.
Rather delightfully, deadstock pieces such as the kaleidoscopic garter-stitch scarves count among the collection’s most joyous items. “Because this collection drops during the Stella-bration season,” she says, referring to her 25th anniversary, “I wanted it to have a more celebratory feel.” McCartney knows that sustainable fashion is a serious business better than anyone, which is exactly why she can have such fun with it.
