There’s a lot to say about what Stella McCartney got up to in London on November 10. During the day, she was previewing her debut menswear collection and her Pre-Spring 2017 womenswear at a Methodist chapel she’d hired just across the street from the Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded their album of the same name in 1969. She mentioned, in passing, that she was going to have “a party” at the studios later. Turned out, it was more of a mini-Glastonbury of a night, with DJ sets and live performances on two stages from the Beastie Boys, Beth Ditto, Neneh Cherry, Professor Green, Sharleen Spiteri, and more. A very relaxed, very British-music and fashion-friends-and-family affair it was.
This is the way Stella rolls these days. Springing surprise happenings on people, as she did in Paris last month, rehearsing models to break into a dance routine at the end of her runway show, is one of McCartney’s humanizing talents. Making fashion fun to be around, less icy, less pretentiously distant, and part of normal life is essential to her subliminal brand value. This time the models were standing around with everyone else, eating pizza served from Stella McCartney boxes.
But to the clothes. Earlier in the day, McCartney was talking about the menswear presentation. “It’s something I started thinking about eleven years ago, when I launched the Adidas collection and a guy came up to me and said, ‘Would you do that for men?’ ” she said. “That definitely planted a seed.” Her choice of location begged the obvious question: How much of the collection was related to the influence of her father, Sir Paul McCartney? Answer: bits and pieces, but not all that much. She pointed to a blue shirt embroidered with swallows. “It was mum’s, but then I saw a picture of dad wearing it.” A blue organic denim embroidered shirt was inspired by an earlier Beatles-era snap. “It was more the Maharishi phase. He was wearing it over a formal English shirt.” Another obvious question: Did her husband Alasdhair Willis have any input? “No,” she laughed, though Willis did wear her black boxy-jacketed suit with draped tailored cargo pants to her last show. “We keep our work separate! But I want Al to wear it, my dad to want to wear it, my sons, and my friends.” On offer: everything from short mackintosh raincoats and Prince of Wales check overcoats, to workwear carpenter pants, to spoof football scarves and nu-ravey Members and Non Members Only slogan T-shirts.
A sense of relaxed inclusiveness, with a bit of humor and an emphasis on sustainable and animal cruelty–free ethics is the baseline from which Stella McCartney thinks about her whole operation. “We’ve got such a beautiful relationship with so many women which is based on effortlessness, timelessness, and some sort of honesty, and I thought, ‘Can we deliver that for men?’ You should be able to buy a pair of organic denim jeans if you’re a man. You should be able to buy non-leather shoes if you’re Morrissey, and not sacrifice your style! Our women customers take that for granted.”
On Monday, Stella will give a talk at the London College of Fashion on the sustainable practices which run through her organization, but any casual conversation about her clothes tends to end up going in that direction. “We don’t preach,” she demurs, but, for example, the Pre-Spring collection viscose dresses, printed with hand-painted landscape scenes, started life as raw material extracted from sustainably managed forests in Norway and Sweden, the shirred denim dress is colored with non-chemical dye, and the elaborate black-and-white Western-look tooled appliqué technique on a pair of wicked-looking pin-heeled pumps was achieved with non-animal glue. “That took a long time to get right,” she said, stroking the shoes.
Still, as McCartney well knows, it’s emotionally compelling, lifestyle-relevant style and design that sells clothes. There will be plenty of girls—brides, maybe—who will be hovering over the cream lace dresses, women who fancy the brick-red maxi coat, and dog lovers who will fall for the skirts printed with pedigree canines. That’s besides discovering the new smartly utilitarian Falabella Go nylon totes and backpacks (made from upcycled plastic bottles, natch), which add yet more breadth to Stella McCartney’s highly successful bag collection. Not long to wait for them either—this collection starts dropping from December 1.
