Stella McCartney: from the catwalk to the racetrack, it's an Olympic year
The fashion designer is about to unveil her official London 2012 kit for Team GB – how has she managed to make the McCartney name her own? The first piece of clothing Stella McCartney made, aged 12, was a bomber jacket – and you could say everything else she has made since has been cut from the same cloth. It was dusky pink, a colour that has featured strongly in her adult collections, and was made in fake suede, which shows her early pledge not to use animal skins. The combination of sporty and masculine elements, given a feminine finish couldn't sum up McCartney's style more perfectly. Who knows where it is now? Perhaps forgotten in a trunk somewhere on her father's Sussex estate, to be brought out one day as the cornerstone in a retrospective.
Twenty-eight years on, 2012 is shaping up to be McCartney's year. She has staged an eveningwear show in February during London fashion week – the first time she has shown in the UK for 16 years – opened a new flagship store in London and another in New York, and launched a new perfume. On Thursday, to crown her status as one of Britain's most successful designers, McCartney's official Olympic kit for Team GB will be unveiled.
McCartney has always been prickly about her inherited fame. "When I think about how I've worked solidly since school, never even taking a year off, it pisses me off that people imply I'm here only on the family name," she said in an interview with the Times in 1998. "Maybe the press would give me an easier time if I was a trust fund smackhead."
But she has used her connections to her advantage. When she graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1995, her show was memorable more for the famous friends – Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Yasmin Le Bon – who modelled for her than for the clothes themselves. Her father composed the music, and McCartney would have had to be very naive not to have foreseen the hype it created. "There are two ways of looking at it: 'Well, you would, wouldn't you?' or you think 'Showoff. That's not fair,'" says Melanie Rickey, fashion writer and contributing editor at Grazia. "I thought: 'Good for her'."
Not many 15-year-olds would have wangled work experience with the Christian Lacroix, as McCartney did. The designer Betty Jackson remembers a friend ringing up to ask if she would give McCartney – by then in her final year at college – an interview as an intern. "I said: 'Oh no, we don't want popstar children, it will be far too disruptive,' and this friend said: 'You don't know her, she's really nice and her name is as much a barrier for her.' She came in and she was just the sweetest thing."
Jackson remembers, foremost, "her determination. And she was genuine, there wasn't anything precious about her. [Her parents] had taught that you had to work hard to get what you want and she worked really hard. All the menial tasks – making coffee, picking up pins, doing photocopying, going to get lunch for everybody, running bits of fabric around London. We made no concessions and she didn't expect any." Jackson laughs and says: "She tried to turn us all into vegetarians. She was great. All the seamstresses fell in love with her."
In 1997, McCartney was appointed creative director of Chloé just two years after she graduated. "It was a great job because Chloé was dead in the water," says Rickey. "Her and Phoebe [Philo, her college friend whom McCartney took to the Paris fashion house with her] loved it. I remember doing a story on them and they were standing in this London, urban garage in their bikinis, printing up fabric and just having a whale of a time."
Their young, exciting London energy – at the time of "Cool Britannia" – "was really infectious", though Rickey adds: "People were definitely cynical when she got the job."
Her predecessor Karl Lagerfeld snarled: "Chloé should have taken a big name. They did, but in music, not fashion."
The attacks didn't stop, even after she received good reviews and profits started to rise (eventually she would increase them fivefold, and reinvented the brand). In 1999, the old-guard designer Paco Rabanne called her designs "grotesque and pitiful".
Worse were the reviews of her first solo show in 2001, after the Gucci Group funded the establishment of her own label.
More interesting prints created with the artist Gary Hume, a friend, were drowned out by trashier designs – there were cropped T-shirts with "bristols" written across the front and "trouble and strife" printed on a coat. "It was derivative and it was obvious she was a bit scared," says Rickey. "There was so much hype and I think she must have felt a lot of pressure. But you need to have a very public dressing-down in some senses in order to go back to the drawing-board and work even harder. I think it made her stronger.".
McCartney's fearsome work ethic is renowned. "She's got four children, she designs a line for Adidas, her own line, the accessories, the children's wear, the lingerie, the perfume. It's a remarkable empire," says Harriet Quick, fashion features director of Vogue. "I don't know how she manages to be in so many places at once," says a friend, the model Laura Bailey. "I see her all the time as an amazing, hands-on mother, and then I see her in our work world and she's always 100% present in whatever she's doing. It's never a compromise."
McCartney has often said her desire to work hard came from her upbringing. In an interview last month with the New York Times, McCartney was asked why she went into partnership with the Gucci Group instead of asking her father – who has an estimated fortune of £495m – for money to set up her label. "We don't do things like that in my family," she said. "We work."
Growing up in Sussex, Paul and Linda McCartney's four children were sent to the local state school, dressed in hand-me-downs and home haircuts, and Stella McCartney had part-time jobs to earn pocket money.
"When they were born, they lived in this tiny folly in Sussex for a while before Paul had the house built," says Sir Peter Blake, the artist who created the Sgt Pepper album cover and has been a friend of the McCartneys for decades. "Even then it was very modest. There were probably only about three bedrooms and I think Stella and Mary shared a room. [Paul and Linda] tried to give them a reality to their lives."
McCartney has often said that her mother, who died in 1998, is her inspiration. "Paul and Linda's love was a very strong love, and that was imparted to the children," says Blake. By all accounts, McCartney thrives on family life. She and her husband of eight years, Alasdhair Willis, a branding consultant, have four children – all under the age of seven – and divide their time between their house in west London, near McCartney's studio, and a house in Worcestershire, that with its land, horses and other animals, is reminiscent of her childhood home.
Why does Blake think McCartney has been a successful designer? "I think being a good designer is within you or it's not," he says. "She manages to retain a straightforward, simple approach. Beyond that, she has a tenacity to make it work. She knows what she wants to do and goes for it."
Bailey – who describes McCartney as "super-disciplined, really fun, incredibly loyal and thoughtful; and she gives the best parties" – adds that she "isn't a people-pleaser". Her refusal to use fur and leather in her collections is admirable, though McCartney has admitted she is in a privileged position. "The greatest luxury of having the parents I had was that it has enabled me not to have to compromise," she has said.
"In the back of my mind, I always knew if this all goes horribly wrong, I'll be all right. That's an option most people just don't have, financially."
It isn't clear how she reconciled her principles with her joint venture with Gucci – now owned by PPR, its other fur-and-leather-loving labels include Yves Saint Laurent – but McCartney's refusal to produce leather handbags, a vital part of any fashion brand these days, could have affected her bottom line (although her Falabella range has sold well). "If she had created [handbags] in leather, there probably would have been more sales," says Quick. "But she stuck to her principles, which became a mark of differentiation. She has allied herself to a more ecologically-sound, ethically smart type of company." Which has, in itself, become fashionable, the more so because it seems genuine? "Exactly."
Dan Mathews, vice president of the campaign organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which McCartney supports – last month, she fronted a video campaign against the leather industry – says she isn't a po-faced activist. "Not at all. She's a laugh, she's very funny. She's very frank and opinionated. She is as in touch with us as we are in touch with her about ideas."
He has known McCartney since her parents joined the campaign in the late 1980s. "Her mother was the big animal rights person in the family and I think Paul and the kids absorbed it," he says. McCartney's adherence to Linda's beliefs, he says, is "definitely to honour her mother, but it's also a very basic instinct to do this. She feels it in her heart and soul."
Although most interviews describe how grounded she is, McCartney's life is far less low-key than her childhood was. Her friends include Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna; her children are at private schools, which she has felt moved to defend; everybody wanted to know what she really thought about Heather Mills, but most pertinently, her clothes are beyond the realm of most women. A dress averages around £700, and trousers around £350.
However, McCartney designed a range for the high-street retailer H&M in 2005, which sold out immediately, and also for the Australian budget store Target in 2007. In 2004, she started working with Adidas on a biannual collection of fashionable gymwear, and was chosen to design the Olympic kit.
"Stella is very British," says the Adidas spokesman Steve Marks, "and she has also shown she can apply fashion traits to very technical garments, and understands how the athletes work."
Meanwhile, McCartney's mainline collection has become critically admired and influential, and sales have followed – the latest accounts for the UK side of the business show a 34.4% rise in profits to £2.8m during 2010. "She has a sense of confidence and breadth of ideas that have come across in the last two or three years," says Quick. "She has stepped up to another level. Her collections have been some of the most exciting in Paris over the last few seasons. I think she's really brilliant with proportion and silhouette and always produces a hit dress of the season, whether it's the polka dot one or the one with the trompe l'oeil hourglass from winter."
McCartney would never have survived in the fashion world, let alone flourished, based on her name alone. "There's no room for that," says Quick. "One also has to remember the McCartney name doesn't really mean much to a teenager now – the resonance really only works around a certain demographic. She has made the name her own."
