Stella McCartney’s Resort 2023 Collection was operating on eight cylinders of creative and manufacturing moxie as fashion’s greatest advocate for the environment and PETA-friendly alternative materials hit her highest bar yet.

McCartney’s resort collection was photographed in and around her eco factory in Novara, Italy. Stella reported that 85% of the collection is produced sustainably.

Stella McCartney also has an instinctive embrace of great marketing, making her “Rewilding and rechilding” tagline a marketing hit.

In these climate-change catastrophes times, where California’s 3,000 year-old sequoias — adapted to withstand bad fires — are facing an existential crisis that threatens their future existence, ‘rechilding’ has great appeal.

For Stella, low-slung jeans and acid shades conjured her ‘90s wild child days — the untamed Stella woman living freely and in harmony with Mother Earth.

For others, the resort collection channels childhood memories of living more in concert with nature in a pre-Internet world. In Anne’s case climbing a huge hill to pick Mayflowers was a spring ritual for over a decade.

Stella Studies Rewilding Her Own Country Home

Stella McCartney seeks to harness those memories into a commitment to ‘rewilding’ Naturalist Miriam Rothschild and Knepp Farm captured the designer’s imagination and also her desire to live in harmony with Mother Earth.

Rothschild fully gave the Knepp Farm land back to Mother Earth — allowing her to rebalance herself and restore wildlife without disturbance. McCartney is now working with ecologist and reintroduction expert Dereck Gow to rewild her own countryside estate. {Note that Stella calls it a ‘farm’. ]

Wild feelings of rechilding and rewilding both, are expressed through hand-crocheted flowers stitched together on patchwork dresses and broderie anglaise finishes. The soft prints in the collection combine native flora and fauna with a sense of childhood naivety.

Repurposed Grape Waste Alternative Leather

From the Stella McCartney website:

“A new brand symbol representing a harmony and balance with nature, the S-Wave features on a range of bags and low and mid-top vegan trainers – crafted from a plant-based alternative to animal leather repurposed from grape waste. Spring sandals include puffy-soled Air Slides, the Skyla in stretch Alter Mat with a chunky sole and Falabella chain details, as well as strappy Cowboy styles on a wooden block heel. The Elyse platform shoe is revisited as a playful vegan clog.”

Note that McCartney’s commitment to mycelium remains devoted. But the grape waste leather alternative is a much-less complicated vegan material that can be produced in large quantities.