Did you see that no-visible-means-of-support dress that Stella McCartney was wearing at the Met Gala? The one where she was standing next to Mary J. Blige, who was in an ivory Stella tuxedo and coat? Somehow, said dress, in white, forest-friendly viscose, was suspended from a wired off-the-shoulder infrastructure. It then swooped into a deep plunge, and flowed onwards into a sumptuous goddess-y drape.
But how does it stay on? “It’s architectural, almost like a Christo,” she explained on a Zoom call. “It’s suspended off a corset. The corsetry comes up, and it just captures you, and it just extends beyond the area of your bust and creates this dramatic silhouette. I love the simplicity of it, and the drama of it.” It turns out she was test-driving the studio prototype at the Met. “It feels so wearable when you have it on. I think it’s quite difficult to create a dress that you can wear and feel modern, and still yourself in,” she testifies.
That dress, as well as other variants on the wired neckline, appear in the pre-spring collection. Recently—since she became independent—McCartney has become even more focused on what she does best. “On the strengths that we have that are very clear to me and to the team and also very individual. I think it’s about having an attitude. A really strong point of view that I have always had as Stella. And this effortlessness as well.”
Dilution and caution are not part of the plan. This pre-spring collection is named A Walk on the Wild Side, a punning nod to McCartney’s love for nature and animals, as well as for hot, sexy dressing. It repeats and underscores the shapes in the last runway collection—and the idea she tags “Laptop to Lapdance,” the synonym for day-to-evening, in Stella-speak. The laptop itself can be accommodated in the enlarged Ryder bag, which comes in recycled faux suede or ostrich look-alike Mycelium-based leather. “We are an activist brand, and an artistic brand. You can have both.”
She has something to cover every eventuality, in a collection that is achieved with 96% conscious materials and is 100% cruelty-free. There is her tailoring (eternally inspired by the Savile Row bespoke suits her parents ordered from Tommy Nutter), a white midi-dress with a back-dipping hem, and a sweatsuit with knitwear embedded trompe l’oeil-wise in the front. Loving animals doesn’t hold Stella back from loving animal prints. Last season it was snake, this time it’s an oversized ocelot fur pattern, scanned from a photograph of the cat’s incredibly beautiful markings.
The arc of the brand’s offering includes a full spectrum of eveningwear. The drapey, clingy super-short part of it surely harks back to the 1980s and to the second coming of body-con, the neon-bright disco-dress rage which came out of London in the 2000s. She likens the super-molded ones to lingerie contour engineering. “Just really simple, like power mesh, this little suck-you-in hot, sexy, chuck-it-in-a-bag dress,” as she puts it. A whole new generation can now take advantage of this; if they were born in 2000, they’d be 25 years old, which happens to be exactly the same age as the Stella McCartney business.
The arc of what McCartney does lands in souped-up denim—she says she’s been doing well with demand for fake leather ‘chaps’ jeans and standouts like her fierce cross-lacing seamed ones. There’s a tank printed with the word HARDCORE amongst this section. Meaningless fun? Yes, maybe, yet even there, McCartney’s relentless pursuit of eliminating harm shows up. According to the press release, the black printing is done with Living Ink, a natural renewable non-toxic dye made from spirulina waste, a byproduct “from the national supplement industry.”
