Stella McCartney Spotlights Her Partners in Sustainability for Summer 2024

Ana Colón

2 October 2023 at 11:37 am·5-min read

There's an inherent paradox to being "sustainable" fashion brand. Of course, the most sustainable thing to do would be to not make anything new, and instead use or repurpose what's already out there — but that's not how running a fashion brand, which lives and dies on novelty, has historically worked. The path Stella McCartney has taken is material innovation: piloting, investing in, playing around with emerging textiles and fabrication methods that might not cancel out the impact of six collections annually, but work towards making that output the least harmful as possible.

For the Summer 2024 collection — which, according to the show notes, is crafted from "95% conscious materials, making it Stella McCartney's most responsible offering to date" — the brand took over Paris' Marché Saxe-Breteuil and renamed it "Stella's Sustainable Market." There, across 22 stalls, it highlighted some of the collaborators, values and influences it's pulled from over the course of its 20-year "cruelty free and conscious" journey.

Those include projects like Adidas By Stella McCartney, Stella McCartney Kids and Stella McCartney Vintage, as well as Linda McCartney Foods, Record Station and other companies that speak to McCartney herself and her family. Six played a role in the new line: NFW (responsible for the plant-based, plastic- and water-free animal leather alternative Mirium), Keel Labs (maker of Kelsun, a seaweed-based yarn being used in luxury fashion for the first time), Mabel Industries (from which the brand sources UppealTM️, a vegan animal leather alternative made from apple waste), Vegea (purveyor of grape leather), NONA Source (the platform that collects and repurposes deadstock fabrics from LVMH maisons), Stella McCartney beauty and sculptor and "wearable art" maker Andrew Logan.

The brand describes the collection as "a study in family, freedom and fluidity – exploring Stella's roots in music, her parents' relationship and shared wardrobes, and the care for our fellow creatures and Mother Earth they instilled in her." McCartney uses this framework of revisiting not just her own memories of borrowing her parents' clothes (and them borrowing each other's clothes), but also her archive, to pull out silhouettes that are timeless to create something that's "eclectic" and "ageless," that "blurs the lines between genders and generations," according to the show notes: pinstriped tailcoats, tailored suiting, ruffled shirts, diamond-encrusted bodysuits, crocheted knits, billowing dresses, biker jackets.

The material innovation undertaken by brands like Stella McCartney is incredible and impressive. If you're in the market for, say, a baggy everyday jean or a black bomber jacket, it's amazing that there are options that not only come with sustainability bona fides, but that there are designers that treat them as standard. It sets the bar at a whole different level.

Still, a collection like this one — which is predicated on ideas of timelessness and staples — brings the paradox back into the equation: It's one of two annual runway propositions that introduce 50+ looks riffing on ideas of "wardrobe staples" and "basics you can wear over and over again" (things you don't necessarily need to buy multiples of, certainly not biannually). It's something I think about a lot, especially as "sustainability" is brought up more and more often, both by brands and shoppers alike.

The reality is, at the end of the day, the cycle of consumption always wins in fashion, and the customer wants newness. So, there will be an updated version of a familiar style, a reinterpretation of an archival silhouette, a fresh colorway of a best-seller.

Of course, these issues aren't any one designer's to solve — the fact that McCartney even talks about this is better than most, which choose to say nothing at all — but it does feel more important to weigh in the context of fashion week, and especially in the context of a brand that lives under the LVMH umbrella, one of the most powerful institutions and arguably one of the few capable of fundamentally changing a system.

Keep scrolling to see every look from Stella McCartney Spring 2024.