You’ve got to love Stella McCartney and frankly I do. Backstage after her terrific en plein air show this gray yet (finally!) dry Paris morning, McCartney was fielding questions about the collection she’d just shown. It had riffed on swaggering big shouldered suiting and capacious trenches (both very much in evidence these past few days) for day and plissé dresses and delicate lingerie with slouchy trousers for night. All of this came with some very ’80s sculpted Charles Jourdan–esque high sandals, flat boxing boots for the pugilist in us all, and a new duffel bag shape called the Ryder in vegan materials which came in every size from delicately petite to big enough to accommodate plenty of clothing changes for a three-day trip. Watching the proceedings: Natalia Vodianova, unsurprisingly (she and McCartney are friends); and, very surprisingly, Virginie Viard, who recently departed Chanel, and was there for a rare public appearance with her son Robinson Fyot. It was a lovely gesture of sisterly solidarity that McCartney excels at.
Anyway: Back to the backstage. What was McCartney’s favorite look? The blue bubbly cloud of a mini dress crafted out of recycled plastic bottles, she said. The fact she’d put Mother on a tank? Because, she replied, we’re all mothers and we inhabit Mother Earth, so it’s a pretty good word—then adding, conspiratorially, but don’t tell anyone, the word fucker is in tiny print at the bottom. And a question on her favorite color led her to talk about blue skies, and ergo, birds, the whole inspiration for the collection. Birds had been used as a dove print, a golden avian in flight as a bra top, a necklace, a bangle, and a hefty bag charm, and were on the soundtrack courtesy of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and a specially written word piece intonated at the show’s opening by Helen Mirren. McCartney took a breath. “We’re talking about not killing birds this season,” she said, “but a billion and a half birds are killed for fashion. Feathers belong on birds, so we can be inspired by them. This season was about being elevated, being a bird, being free and seeing things from a different perspective: masculinity, femininity.”
This is classic McCartney, and is why, after being in business some 20-plus years, she retains her position as a creative force who’s willing to voice her criticisms of an industry which contributes—if one can use that word—to the environmental situation we currently find ourselves in, dancing not so merrily on the edge of a volcano. McCartney smartly understands the secret is to engage, and engage, and engage, again and again and again, every way you can: The About Fucking Time caps (she and PETA have used the phrase to highlight their new-ish campaign around animal welfare, or the lack thereof) which sat on every seat; the copies of The Stella Times which were also there, a newspaper filled with facts and statistics; and more generally, the way she fuses hard and unpalatable truths with that tongue-in-cheek British sense of humor of hers to make people hopefully think. Her clothes today were great, really great, but when you consider everything else she is doing to sound the alarm on a situation which is likely heading towards a worrying unknown, you can only regard her with the greatest of respect.
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