Stella McCartney has a brand to build—and a beautiful new store to go with it. For summer, she'll be filling her shop with the kind of clothes for which she’s already known: flighty little dresses and chiffon blouses, mixed with great suits. Her departure this season was to leave aside the street-toughness of some of her former collections, replacing it with delicate washed-out color and embellished details. There was a lot more polish and softness about this show—a confident step forward for a young designer who's taking her place on the international platform.
Vintage-inspired lingerie, one of McCartney's recurring themes, was threaded through the collection. The opening bodysuit was pieced in rose satin and chiffon and worn with sage-green puffy shorts; a later jumpsuit had lace inserts running down the sides. Addicts of the designer's mannish tailoring, meanwhile, will have found her quintessential jacket done in gray-blue Prince of Wales check, matched with pants that had a lattice of open work along the outside seam.
Don't imagine Stella's quite settled down to the quiet life yet, though. For evening, she festooned gold chains onto the bodices of cutout dresses and tops, and amped up the jacket with traceries of glitter. Her hippest new idea came in the form of puffy satin bombers—she transformed one, a bright-yellow fusion of sport and chinoiserie print, into an off-the-shoulder bubble dress. McCartney is so into the glam-bomber idea, in fact, that she bounded onto the runway wearing a black version herself.
