“$6,000 and it’s not even leather!” We were at a Stella McCartney show, so it was most definitely not leather. Nor was it python or ostrich that appeared on McCartney’s fall runway, but something called Yatay M, a vegan fabrication which can be made to look like them, and which is manufactured out of fungi mycelium and recycled polyester, and biobased polyurethane.
Yatay M is part of McCartney’s forthright and laudable drive to keep innovating to produce alternatives to so many of the materials that luxury fashion holds dear. This time around it was ‘exotics’ that were on her mind. (And before we even get to the rights or wrongs of using animals for raw materials, that particular term has always struck me as rather icky.) McCartney used her alternatives in expected ways, for her roomy Ryder bags and Falabella totes, but also less expectedly for her sculpted, sharp as a tack, definitely-a-hint-of-the-workplace-1980s silhouette, which dominated the proceedings: a pumped up ‘python’ zippered blouson that Lynne Koestler would have looked knockout in back in the day, insouciantly tucked into a pair of slouchy boyish beige pants, say, while the same faux skin was used for a lean skirt with a ‘snakeskin’ draped blouse atop it.
That ’80s refrain—boss shoulders on big blazers, draped silken dresses bloused on the top and narrowing to the hem, and a veritable trove of black lace cocktail numbers that would have given Emanuel Ungaro a run for his money—played loud and strong. To amplify it, McCartney had clearly got the Back to The Office mandate, because she set her dress-for-success show in the kind of corporatescape that would be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office or at the very least seen the 1988 movie Working Girl (I watched it again the other weekend and was reminded of that immortal “$6,000” line delivered by Joan Cusack to Melanie Griffith, and there was definitely a whiff of those two icon-istas in this collection.) It was like so much of what McCartney does hilariously tongue in cheek, with ‘colleagues’—actually McCartney-clad actors—buzzing around in an increasingly maniacal fashion, like any of us would when we are trying to meet a particularly punishing deadline. The whole thing took a positively surreal turn as guests—Tom Ford, Kate Moss, Olivia Colman, Cameron Diaz, Ice Spice, and my favorite pairing, Brigitte Macron chatting to Jeff Koons—milled around. At the close of the show, male and female pole dancers were spinning up a storm, and there were surely H.R. violations all round.
And yet: Strip away some great clothes and the ribald depiction of corporate life, and we were confronted with the question that McCartney has always been asking: Who exactly is holding the power here? Through all the incarnations of her brand—from indie fledging to Kering to LVMH and now solo once more—McCartney hasn’t ever shied from striving to not do things the same old way, and with the same old standards and ideals. She has stuck to her values and challenged the status quo—a document lays out year by year the technological and sustainability challenges she has set herself. Good for her. Given where everything is today—and given how fashion is having to work to maintain its relevance in the world—we need that now more than ever.
