During her collection shoot at Tate Modern, Stella McCartney took a moment to walk through the museum on her own. As it has been left deserted by the pandemic, she had every gallery to herself. “It was just me, alone in the Tate, looking at the Lichtensteins, the Delaunays, the Légers,” she said, on the phone from London. “It was amazing. It made me feel happy to be alive again.” While her collection was imbued with those feelings, there was more to it than plain post-lockdown joie de vivre. In a time when many designers are resetting—cutting things back to the core—McCartney turned up the volume higher than she has in years. Fittingly, she described it as “extreme.”
To understand the emotional value of the trippy techniques, bold colors, warped motifs, and cyber textures that blasted through her collection, you have to understand the transformation McCartney has been going through. Before the pandemic, she bought her company back from Kering, entered a new partnership with LVMH, and found herself in the midst of a global climate revolution as the industry’s trailblazer. “The business was going through a transition, which was in my every breath. Those changes mixed with COVID changes were an epiphany moment,” she said. “Now, I want it to feel like a fresh start for the brand; a rebirth.”
To fashion, the lockdown period has served as a magnifying glass for sustainable reforms. It must have felt like an absolution for McCartney, who spent the year publishing an “A to Z Manifesto” of her brand values and outlining her every sustainable move, in material available on her website. It’s worth the read. The causes she has represented over two decades in the industry are no longer “Stella’s causes,” but everyone’s causes. And if they have sometimes taken focus from her creativity, the new fashion climate allows her clothes to shine in a different way. “What’s so lovely is to be asked about the collection again,” she exclaimed after half an hour of pure clothes talk, hinting at years of sustainability-focused interviews.
It doesn’t make it any less important to highlight the 77% of sustainable materials and state-of-the-art upcycling and vegan technologies that went into this collection. But they are not what made her teenage daughter Bailey ask for the popcorn-textured 3D-knitted Klein blue flares and hoodie that recalled the spiked rubber jumpers of the 1990s (“I said, ‘They’re not cheap, and you’re only 14!’”), or what made those mosaic trousers constructed from faux leather embroidered on tulle so entrancing. Those effects were the joy of fashion, and a return to the audacity, youthful energy, and wit that catapulted McCartney into fashion fame in the first place all those years ago.
“There’s a fearlessness and newness to youth. You feel less liberated as you get older,” she reflected. “This brand is so young in so many aspects—its belief systems, how we don’t come at anything in a conventional way—and I want the spirit of what I do to come through in the fashion too.” These clothes felt extremely personal to Stella McCartney, but they were loaded with a kind of energy we could all do with at this point in time.
