The following is an abridged excerpt from Paris-based journalist Dana Thomas’s “Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes”, which will be published by Apollo Books in the UK on 5 September.
In early 1997, Stella McCartney was approached by the owners of French luxury ready-to-wear brand Chloé in Paris to replace Karl Lagerfeld, who was stepping down as designer. She knew the house well: “My mum wore Chloé in the ’70s, so I had that floating around the house,” she told me at the time.
During her initial meeting with Chloé executives, McCartney put forth her key design requirements: no leather, no fur. Ever.
“You take or leave it,” she said. “It’s not an option.”
She looked at me as she recalled the moment, her aquamarine eyes deadly serious. “Stella Steel”, as she has been called, is without question a woman of conviction.
There was resistance, but in the end, they took it.
When the deal was signed and announced in April 1997, 25-year-old McCartney squealed excitedly to a reporter: “Wow! I got Karl Lagerfeld’s job!” A lot of other fashion folks thought the same, albeit sceptically, and grumbled that she landed it because of who her father is rather than for her talent. Lagerfeld snipped in the press: “I think they should have taken a big name. They did — but in music, not fashion.”
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With her first show, dedicated to her then-ailing mother and held at Paris’s Palais Garnier opera house in October the same year, McCartney disproved her doubters. Suzy Menkes, now editor, Vogue International, wrote in the International Herald Tribune: “Although she was following in the giant footprints of Karl Lagerfeld in Chloé’s glory years, McCartney wisely sent out a simple, unpretentious show literally filled with little nothings: dresses as light as a scarf; wispy printed blouses with floaty flower-child sleeves; slithery negligee dresses ... It was a fine first effort.”
Before long, McCartney was dressing style influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman and Madonna, who wore a sexy pair of low-slung Chloé tuxedo pants with a sequin waistband in her “Ray of Light” video.
Chloé was commanding more retail space in department stores, and sales climbed.
“What Stella did was surprise everybody, by very, very quickly developing her own style,” American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour said. “We have so few women designers who are really important in the field of fashion, and it’s great to have someone like Stella joining the ranks. She has made a lot of very young, very attractive girls want to buy those clothes.”
But her no leather-no fur policy drew fire. Critics claimed that faux hides, many of which are petroleum-based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff. Bull, said McCartney.
“Livestock production is one of the major causes of... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution and loss of biodiversity,” she said, adding that more than fifty million animals are farmed and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans.
“Tanneries are listed as top polluters on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Superfund’” list, a US federal program to underwrite the clean-up of contaminated industrial sites, she added. Yet about 90 per cent of all leather is chrome tanned.
“Killing animals is the most destructive thing you can do in the fashion industry,” she told me. “The tanneries, the chemicals, the deforestation, the use of landmass and grain and water, the cruelty — it’s a nonstarter. The minute you’re not killing an animal to make a shoe or a bag you are ahead of the game.”
McCartney quit Chloé in 2001 and launched her namesake label in London. The luxury conglomerate Gucci Group, which was later absorbed by Kering, held a 50 per cent stake; she held the other half. (In March 2019, she completed a buyback of the Kering half. And in July, LVMH acquired a minority stake in Stella McCartney.)
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With the Gucci deal, she was swiftly accused of getting into bed with the enemy: the Italian brand, at its core, is a leather goods company. However, to her mind, she was “infiltrating from within”. Not only was McCartney planning to hold fast to her conscious fashion ethic at her own brand; she wanted to sway the group’s other brands, such as Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, to take it up, too.
Her no-leather stance led to a great deal of head-scratching in the Gucci Group executive suite. After all, logo-heavy leather goods, such as handbags, wallets and key fobs, are the cash cow of the luxury industry: they are easy to sell, instantly convey status and boast retail markups of 20 to 25 times the production costs.
“It was like: ‘How are we going to do this? Oh my God. We have to weigh the loss of leather sales,’” she remembered. “I was told: ‘You’re never going to have a healthy accessories business with non-leather.’ I’ve proven that wrong.”
One of the advantages of being a female designer (and a celebrity one, at that) is you can serve as a walking advertisement for your work. With her natural beauty (she regularly will forgo makeup) and her de facto fame, which she takes coolly in her stride, McCartney is most effective in this regard.
On the day we met, she was wearing a white organic cotton twill shirt that set off her sweep of russet-blond hair and her freckles, khaki men’s pants “from about five seasons ago” that hung on her body like a boyfriend’s pyjama bottoms, and butterscotch faux leather sandals on her impeccably pedicured feet. “I’m a mash-up of seasons, menswear and women’s wear,” she said, laughing as she took in her outfit. It was all comfortably stylish and sustainable — true modern fashion.
She then showed me her handbag: a honey-hued miniature version of her best-selling Falabella. It was made of synthetic leather and lined with recycled fake suede. As I turned it over in my hands and ran my fingertips across the grain, she asked, “Really, does anyone know it’s not leather?”
Not I, I thought.
In 2006, McCartney’s company turned a profit — five years after its inception and a year ahead of schedule. A “significant” portion of those sales was from accessories, a McCartney spokesman told me; one published report estimated that they make up one-third of her turnover. (McCartney doesn’t reveal such numbers.)
Having proven that going skin-free is a viable business model, she decided to see what other environmentally noxious materials could be eliminated from her line. She hit upon one: polyvinyl chloride, known as PVC.
PVC is one of the most pervasive plastics today. Cling film, drinking straws, credit cards, toys, artificial Christmas trees, Scotch tape and plumbing pipes are all made of it. In fashion, it is used for transparent shoe heels, vinyl raincoats, synthetic patent leather, and the flexible tubing inside handbag handles. But it is a known carcinogen, and when it biodegrades, it releases poisons into the soil and water table. In 2010, McCartney banned all use of PVC at her company.
“Taking PVC out was a huge thing for us,” she said. “I’d say: ‘Let’s do a clear heel! Let’s do a Perspex trench!’ PVC, PVC, PVC. ‘Let’s do sequins!’ There are two sequins in the world without PVC. There are millions of gorgeous sequins, but they have PVC.”
By 2016, all Kering brands had stopped using PVC. For McCartney, it was a big win.
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Stella McCartney: "Clothes are not going anywhere"
