Stella McCartney's 2021 Sustainability Message by Mert & Marcus 'A to Z'
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Sustainable design guru Stella McCartney launched her Spring 2021 show with a doubling down on her original core brand beliefs of cruelty free and created with respect for the environment in the form of an ‘A to Z’ manifesto.
“I felt it was a moment to rewrite the set of rules for us to adhere to and to work toward here at Stella McCartney,” the designer said. “It [articulates] a wonderful reason for us to exist, something for us to design and work toward.”
The ‘A to Z’ manifesto was released with a fashion show at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, built in the 1720 for Great Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Stella’s photographer friends Mert & Marcus created these images from the Spring 2021 show featuring Caren Jepkemei, Grace Clover, Hannah Motler, Jan Baiboon and Quinn Mora. Jane How styled the Stella McCartney Spring 2021 event.
The McCartney A to Z Manifesto: Summer 2021 Show collection film debuted today – personifying a collective desire for movement and connection with our bodies, nature and art. Conceived during lockdown, we questioned how and why we do everything – returning to the world more mindful, grateful and focused on what matters. The collection reflects our core values and is made with 65% sustainable materials.
Athleticism and Escapism
In an interesting twist, McCartney tied the designs to women using athleticism for escapism. There is no doubt that the so-called “runners high” fuels a calm state of clarity of thinking. In Stella’s World this clarity of brain and body function created in athletic escapism is directly tied to respect for nature and one’s surroundings.
It’s a state of being that few fashionistas actually achieve, and Stella is quick to argue that this desired clarity of thinking around sustainability is being diluted by brands jumping willy-nilly on the sustainability bandwagon.
“There’s so much greenwashing going around,” McCartney said in a video conference, referring to other fashion brands, “and there’s so much confusion going on. I barely know what the word sustainable means anymore. So it’s to give a level of clarity, really.”
Stella McCartney’s SS2020 Collection is fresh and sensual. “I think it’s important to invest more in timeless materials, but at the same time you can really inject freshness. It shouldn’t be dull,” McCartney explained, referring to those dresses—“completely recycled” from overstock—as an example of the “T for ‘timeless,’” which is part of her sustainability strategy.
As people are assaulted by marketing messages that play loose with the definitions of sustainability, we TRUST Stella McCartney to set us straight. Many of us are so impacted by global events and human suffering that we’ve chosen this time to craft our own personal manifestos for living on planet Earth.
Thankfully, McCartney understands our desire to use clothes to express ourselves while living honestly a set of personally-crafted values. “Everyone’s like, ‘don’t do eveningwear’,” said McCartney, “but for me I definitely think there has to be optimism, we’ve still gotta get dressed up, we’ve gotta come out of this not wearing sweatpants. And we will come out of this.”
“I've always said that one of the responsibilities that we have as designers to be sustainable is to create timeless pieces,” the designer says. “Designing in a timeless way is also about using materials that are timeless and investing more in them. It's way more sustainable if you buy into something deeper and you give a level of some permanence to it.”
Anders Christian Madsen critiqued the Spring 2021 Stella McCartney show for Vogue, and one of his statements is inexplicable to AOC— most likely because we are not on his intellectual level:
McCartney’s post-confinement women stomped ferociously around Full Moon Circle, an imposing planetary Richard Long work that resembles austere moonstone. The spectacle evoked images of paganism, like some Mother Nature–worshipping séance for our post-pandemic environmental awakening. If witchcraft has historically been loaded with an almighty sense of female-gaze sexuality, McCartney’s collection came full circle.
In decades of reading/writing about witches, this is the first time their perceived power and source of male and mob fear has been reduced to “an almighty sense of female-gaze sexuality”. It’s difficult to process a feminist history of witchcraft laden with totally disproportionate numbers of women being burned at the stake as being loaded with predominantly sexual overtones. We’re not talking the irrepressible, frankly-sexual Madonna here.
AOC will be trying to better understand what Madsen means. ~ Anne
While creating her A to Z Manifesto, Stella McCartney reached out to a collection of 26 artists asking them to pick a letter and visualize it for her project. “Each artist’s letter is essential to our visual dictionary of the conscious intentions we live by every day we go to work – and will be elaborated on in our collections in the coming weeks,” the designer explains on her website.
Participating artists include Alex Israel, Chantal Joffe, Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Joana Vasconcelos, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Blake, Rashid Johnson, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Taryn Simon, and William Eggleston. Read more about the artists here.
