She s become known for a playful, happy kind of cool, and Stella McCartney s latest collection furthered her easygoing cause with a deft assimilation of the season s trends. She started out with a long, flowing seventies dress in a wildflower-scattered silk voile, loosely tied at the neck, then used the same colorful fabric for the jumpsuits her label is so identified with. Doing her bit for the current pajama-dressing moment, she showed boxy blue silk pj tops with tap pants peeking out from beneath, or extended the top s hem a few inches down the thigh for a reinterpretation of her favorite shirtdresses.
Many of the white cotton frocks, with their dippy backs and suggestive ruffles, could ve been nightgowns in a former life—but McCartney balanced all the dishabille with the blazers that she cut her teeth on in Savile Row, this time in a safari khaki or in double-breasted snow-white, worn with fluid, full-to-the-cuffed-ankle trousers.
The designer has a well-known dedication to vegetarianism and the environment, and the show s backdrop, a lushly beautiful "vertical vegetal wall" by the botanist Patrick Blanc, will be donated to a low-income housing project in Boulogne, part of an effort to help teach ecology at street level. The carved wooden clogs she asked her models to wear won t make it on the street, however: One pair didn t even make it up and down the runway before falling apart. But that s not of much consequence when the clothes are as pretty and wearable as they were today.
