Stella McCartney is back with a boldly transparent look for spring 2021—and we’re not talking about see-through clothes. “Like many of us, I found myself asking deep questions of myself and of the brand,” she says in an Instagram post on the self-reflection that the pandemic brought to all of us. “What is our meaning, our purpose?”
Well, the design work that came out of her intense period of reflection is launching on 8 October with a digital show and a lookbook—it’s breezy Stella, shot in the open air—but what’s equally to the point is what she’s talking about on Instagram. “I arrived at a set of value systems, an A to Z of what I think we stand for at Stella McCartney, which in a sense, is a manifesto,” she relates. “The SS21 collection adheres to this set of rules.”
She starts to spell it out: ‘A for Accountable’, ‘C for Conscious’, ‘O for Organic’, ‘V for Vegan’. Letters illustrating the brand’s commitments have started to pop up on her Instagram feed: Cindy Sherman embodies ‘E for Effortless’, Linda McCartney represents ‘L’, and a William Eggleston print denotes ‘T for Timeless’.
Meanwhile, on 26 September, she underscored her mission by publishing the Stella McCartney Eco Impact Report for 2018/19, announced by former executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres. It opens with a declaration that, “We remain committed to transforming the fashion industry,” followed by a clear, non-jargony holistic disclosure, set out in graphics and maps of McCartney’s operational costs to the natural world: slightly down from €8.22m in 2018, to €8.21m in 2019.