Stella gets her groove back
(Filed: 25/01/2005)
She's the billionaire's daughter who went to a comprehensive school, the militant vegetarian who wears leather boots; no wonder the fashion designer Stella McCartney has spent most of her life on the defensive. Has her success – and impending motherhood – finally allowed her to relax? Almost, finds Sabine Durrant
Stella McCartney: a career in pictures
Stella McCartney, a vegetarian, has it written into her contract at Gucci, the parent company of her fashion label, that she won't work with leather or fur.
Wary of her public image: Stella McCartney
She is vocal in her condemnation of the coats of her friends – Madonna, say, or Gwyneth. ('I'm always, like, "What the f***k are you doing with that?"') She has banned the hunt from crossing her Worcestershire estate, and worked with the organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on a film about the brutality of animal slaughter. It's even been reported she won't sit on a leather chair.
'Nothing dead,' she once said, 'ever walks through my door.'
We've arranged to meet on neutral ground – a café near her London house – but none the less I've taken care not to upset her: tweed shoes, a canvas bag. At the last minute I remember my belt and dash to the loo to remove it. When she arrives the first thing I notice is her cowboy boots, the colour of pale calf, slightly battered. They look so much like leather it's uncanny.
'Yeah, I know,' she says, and tucks them out of sight. They must be the ones she sells – the veggie shoes that have been such a hit in her shops. I bend to admire them again, to touch them, but she's tucked her feet so far under her stool I can't reach them. It's only then it dawns that something dead may, actually, have walked out of her door.
'Oh, these are leather,' I say. 'No, wait, these are vintage,' she replies.
Around Stella McCartney some puzzling contradictions tend to cluster. Paul and Linda spent all those years in Sussex bringing up her and her siblings as normal kids: local comprehensive, country lanes, shared bedrooms. And yet it happened anyway: she finished her degree at Central St Martins in 1995 a ready-made McCartney model of pop chick/fashion/vintage/cool.
You'd think she'd do anything to prove she's more than her name, but she doesn't seem able to leave it alone. She called the perfume she launched in 2003 Stella because, 'It's the name that my Mum and Dad gave to me so it is very special,' which could be a sweet form of name-dropping.
She cares enough about the environment to create a wildlife haven on her 271-acre estate, to ask guests at her wedding (she married Alasdhair Willis, the former publisher of Wallpaper magazine, in 2003) to donate trees instead of gifts. And yet she works in an industry where it is considered normal to bike round a press pack comprising four cardboard folders containing between them 95 pieces of thick paper.
And, while she speaks in the streetwise half-mockney, half-transatlantic tones adopted by some young actresses and models – lots of 'kind of like's, and statements with question marks at the end, a sprinkling of swear-words to show she doesn't care – she is sufficiently removed from the realities of the street to be able to ask without a flicker of irony, 'Do you have a country house?'
There are those who'd like to believe her light on talent – a convenient brand for others to hang their coats on – who jump happily on the losses her label made in its first and second years (£2.7 million and £4.5 million respectively), and who see the flourishing of the Chloé brand since she left in 2001 (sales have reportedly risen by 40 per cent) as proof that the fourfold increases in sales under her tenure were due, all the time, to her friend, colleague and successor as head designer, Phoebe Philo.
But there are others passionate in their support for her – fashion editors, all those people who keep giving her big jobs – who blame market forces for her recent rockiness, who point at how her own style has softened and evolved since her (badly reviewed) first solo collection, and how a label needs time to develop, who would sell their right arm to get their left hand on a pair of her jeans. An e-mail from the fashion department at this magazine arrives headed 'We love Stella! We love Stella!'
After all the talk, all those sheets of paper, there's a little bit of the Wizard of Oz about this ordinary young woman in her beat-up cowboy boots in this small café in Notting Hill. The three of us – her publicist, Stéphane, a snake-hipped Frenchman, is here too – sit on stools at a bar by the window, which means Stella McCartney spends the whole time facing a reflection of Stella McCartney.
She is five months pregnant and has a bad back, which may be why her posture is so erect, her feet neatly together, her hands for the most part clenched in her lap. She is 33 and looks gentler, less sulky and more wholesome than in pictures – her reddish hair long and pulled back, no make-up on her cold-tinged face, the little extra plumpness adding softness to her features.
She's wearing a purple coat with straps and buttons, and seems too self-conscious about her bulge to take it off. 'I'm in total denial about buying stuff for being pregnant,' she says, wrapping it closely around her.
'I really do seem to have an issue with it. I go for anything big enough, anything that will fit me. This is, like, two seasons old.' 'Autumn/winter 03,' interjects Stéphane. McCartney: 'Exactly. I don't even know when it is.'
Stéphane: 'A year ago.'
'A year ago,' repeats McCartney.
Stéphane is here to check no questions are asked about McCartney's pregnancy or 'her family' (though both are subjects she keeps coming back to herself) and that we keep to Fashion,
specifically the range of 'performance wear' she is launching for Adidas.
Stéphane is an insistent prompter. How does she choose what to put on when she's not pregnant?
'I go for the things everyone probably goes for. I don't go massively for what people think when they look at me. I go for comfort and ease and…'
Stéphane: 'Sexy as well, I think.' McCartney: 'Sexy. Yeah...'
What is she like as an employer (she has four designers working with her and, shops included, has 55 people on her payroll)? 'Oh God I don't know. The fact that I'm probably… I'm a boss! It's a worry! I have no idea. I think…'
Stéphane: 'A team player. I think that is something.'
How will the arrival of the baby in April change things?
'I don't really know. I'm sort of playing it by ear. I don't really know what one does, so I'm kinda like… I don't really wanna know? I think people will come to me, to my house, probably.'
Stéphane (soothingly
'That's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to do.'
It's not that McCartney is chippy or defensive. She's clearly trying to be nice ('Aw bless,' she says to me at one point). It's more that she seems so crippled by how she'll be perceived, how you might present her, that she can't relax enough to reflect on a question properly.
Asked whether the physical changes of pregnancy affect her attitude to the female form, she snaps, 'I haven't got saggy t*ts. Yet. For the record.'
She says 'obviously I…' several times as if you know as much about her as she does. And a lot of her answers are tangled up in things that have been said about her in the past, or might be said about her in future. She 'hates', she says, the elitist element of what she does.
'I grew up buying clothes in high-street shops and, whether people like to think I'm talking a load of crap or not, I did.'
She may never have heard of Primart ('Primart? Where is Primart? You make me feel really uncool. Bloody hell'), but does she still wander into Topshop now and again?
'No. I haven't done for a really long time. I don't really go shopping any more. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't like getting recognised to be totally honest. I feel people would be going, "That's Stella McCartney. What the hell's she doing in Topshop?" Do you know what I mean?'
What about Trinny and Susannah – does she ever watch them? McCartney's chin hardens: 'Never.'
Stéphane: 'What? What?'
McCartney: 'Those two girls that talk about everyone, what they wear.'
Stéphane nods: 'What's it called? What To Wear? What Not To Wear?'
McCartney: 'They weren't very nice about me once, so obviously I don't warm to them.'
Stéphane: 'I think they rang up to borrow some clothes from you.'
McCartney: 'Oh, maybe they're nice about me now.' She smiles slyly. 'In which case I love it. It's my favourite programme.'
When she relaxes a little she allows herself to be more interesting. I tell her that I've just been to her shop in Bruton Street – 'Was that the first time? Naughty girl!' – and that I'd tried on two items: a floaty eau-de-nil jersey top that I'd loved ('Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait for the sale. Perfect') and a ludicrous rust and orange silk bomber jacket that cost more than £1,000 and which I'd put on for a laugh but which felt quite nice on.
Active: McCartney's new 'performance' range has been developed with Adidas
'Yeah, I think so. I think it's the amount of padding we put in it and the kind of padding. It was to get that feeling of being wrapped in something and really cosy and protected, but then keep some kind of femininity?'
Would she say that her clothes are as much for how they feel as how they look?
'Definitely. I've always done that. I've always felt that was important. In my degree show I did all these slip dresses with the satin on the inside and the crêpe side out and it was really for me… There's something even more sexual, certainly as sexy, to a garment if you the wearer have secrets, and you the wearer are having an experience. I think it lends itself to how you carry yourself and your attitude.
'Obviously I've always loved antiques and vintage things. I went through a real spell of wearing vintage stockings, finding brand new packets of them in flea markets, and I've always loved that thing about stockings – only you know that you've got stockings on. The guy doesn't know – unless he gets lucky – and it's just so sexy.
'There's something really important in that. I think fashion is about psychological, you know, responses to things and that's part of the job.' She pauses, and then with sudden dryness: 'Thank God. You tried on two things that fitted well. It's rare to hear that in my industry.'
She has reached a stage in her life, she goes on to say, 'when I know I have to be true to myself. I think probably part of my upbringing has made me so I can't function on things that are purely financially based. For me, you know, I really have to have a belief behind it.
'I base all of my decisions on whether it's going to be an interesting project and whether it's going to have validity and when I can talk about it and not actually talk a load of crap.'
Enter Adidas. They approached her about designing for their 'old-school' division, 'and I thought, "How much can I do with three stripes running down a nylon sweatpant?" That's not the biggest challenge for me.'
Instead, she suggested she work on their 'high-performance' side, using new technical materials.
'I think they're surprised at how hands-on I've been. I'm very verbal. They learnt about bringing detail back to sportswear. I question every single thing.'
Stéphane interrupts: 'And the colour palette as well. You made a big influence on that.'
McCartney glances at him and continues.
'Women are not educated in what they have to wear technically to enhance what they're doing. Sneakers are always crap, they're baby pink or baby blue, they're like My Little Pony. They're offensive. I don't see the reason for that.
'I'm like, "Why? Give me a reason for that?" Why is it that I always want the guy's sneaker but they don't do my size? Why is it when they do the guy's sneaker for women, they do it a nasty colour? Like, why is that? Who is designing this stuff?'
She is rubbing her face as she talks, and when she takes her hand away there's a red mark. 'I could talk about it until the cows come home,' she says, then goes quiet.
Stéphane says, 'It takes a year and a half to develop a sole.'
I am a vegetarian, and I don't wear leather or fur. Not even used (though at times I am tempted to buy second hand leather items). But I'm not going to go crazy on the vegetarians/vegans who do. I can see the reasoning for it.
