MATERIAL WORLD
But rather than leave other labels in the dust, McCartney wants to bring them along with her. She knows that by developing and using environmentally friendly materials in her own collections, and talking about it, she can apply pressure to luxury fashion and all apparel to follow suit. Ultimately, her goal is to make real cultural change in the world.
A month after arranging the Bolt collaboration in July, McCartney is still visibly elated. The London-based designer and her family—husband Alasdhair Willis, the creative director of rain-boot company Hunter, and their four children—are spending their annual summer holiday in the Long Island town of Amagansett, New York, at the sprawling compound owned by her father, Paul McCartney, who is, of course, the former Beatle. An earlier downpour has foiled her plans to eat at a favorite outdoor food joint, so we’ve settled, instead, at a restaurant that bills itself as a “Bohemian eatery,” the menu stocked with the requisite kale salads and avocado toast.
McCartney is dressed entirely in her label, from her olive green jacket down to her 100% eco-rubber platform sandals. Stella McCartney, the brand, is known for its signature mix of feminine and masculine, soft and tough. McCartney the person is no different: unfussy, with a disarming warmth and quick sense of humor that slices through pretense. “I wouldn’t even have five minutes of things to talk about if this interview were about fashion,” she tells me soon after we meet. “I can’t think of anything more fucking boring. ‘Oh, my God! Yellow!’”
She’s fond of saying that fashion isn’t modern. “I have great respect for the history and the craft of what I do,” says McCartney, who, in addition to studying fashion design at Central Saint Martins, interned at age 16 with the luxury designer Christian Lacroix, and later with her father’s tailor on Savile Row. “That’s my career foundation, in that most medieval format, and I love it. But the way things are done, the fabrics used—they haven’t changed in a century. Silk has been made the same way for 6,000 years! There’s a resistance to innovation. I’m not just a fashion designer. I’m a businesswoman. In some ways, I feel more connected with architects and product designers.”
McCartney doesn’t get much opportunity to indulge her passions for science and technology with fashion journalists, who “mostly thought I was a fool for being a vegetarian designer,” she says. “I mean, what kind of idiot does that?” Which is one of the reasons she waited to announce the Bolt collaboration until the
