“Rewilding and rechilding.” As taglines go, Stella McCartney has herself a winner this season. Who hasn’t dreamed of returning to their youth, before we’d heard about the threats or seen first-hand the impacts of global warming? Rewilding, for those not plugged into the climate change conversation, involves restoring and protecting wilderness areas by more or less letting nature take care of itself.
McCartney is both the creative director of her own brand and fashion’s foremost sustainability proponent. She’s been reading up on the subject of rewilding via the British naturalist Miriam Rothshild (nickname Queen Bee) and is putting some of its principles into practice at her home in the English countryside. On a Zoom call, she cheerfully promised it can be done on a Manhattan fire escape too, by adding soil and a little log pile to a shoe box and leaving it be. “Nature will come, you’ll see,” she told me. As long as it’s one of my neighoborhood’s red tail hawks, and not the other kinds of wildlife New York City is so well known for.
The designer’s natural-born optimism permeates this collection, which was shot in and around her eco factory in Novara, Italy. McCartney has reason to feel positive. She reported that 85% of the collection was produced sustainably, an in-house record. Among the developments here are bags and trainers made from grape leather, a material created from the grape waste produced in the wine-making process that is more readily available than the mycelium leather alternative she’s also championing.
The rewilding and rechilding concepts she spoke about manifested on a twist-neck blouse printed with creatures forced out of Great Britain by civilization (lynx included), and in brightly colored cotton broderie anglaise dresses and separates as sweet as doll’s clothes. She cut her trademark boss tailoring in tiger stripe jacquards and soft pink wool, but she also played around with miniskirts, her shortest in recent memory. You could say McCartney took the theme to heart. Low-slung yellow jeans and a cami in the same acid shade conjured her ’90s wild child days.
