With her first show, dedicated to her then-ailing mother and held at Paris’s Palais Garnier opera house in October the same year, McCartney disproved her doubters. Suzy Menkes, now editor, Vogue International, wrote in the International Herald Tribune: “Although she was following in the giant footprints of Karl Lagerfeld in Chloé’s glory years, McCartney wisely sent out a simple, unpretentious show literally filled with little nothings: dresses as light as a scarf; wispy printed blouses with floaty flower-child sleeves; slithery negligee dresses ... It was a fine first effort.”
Before long, McCartney was dressing style influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman and Madonna, who wore a sexy pair of low-slung Chloé tuxedo pants with a sequin waistband in her “Ray of Light” video.
Defending faux leather
Chloé was commanding more retail space in department stores, and sales climbed.
“What Stella did was surprise everybody, by very, very quickly developing her own style,” American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour said. “We have so few women designers who are really important in the field of fashion, and it’s great to have someone like Stella joining the ranks. She has made a lot of very young, very attractive girls want to buy those clothes.”
But her no leather-no fur policy drew fire. Critics claimed that faux hides, many of which are petroleum-based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff. Bull, said McCartney.
“Livestock production is one of the major causes of... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution and loss of biodiversity,” she said, adding that more than fifty million animals are farmed and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans.
“Tanneries are listed as top polluters on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Superfund’” list, a US federal program to underwrite the clean-up of contaminated industrial sites, she added. Yet about 90 per cent of all leather is chrome tanned.
“Killing animals is the most destructive thing you can do in the fashion industry,” she told me. “The tanneries, the chemicals, the deforestation, the use of landmass and grain and water, the cruelty — it’s a nonstarter. The minute you’re not killing an animal to make a shoe or a bag you are ahead of the game.”
Infiltrating from within
McCartney quit Chloé in 2001 and launched her namesake label in London. The luxury conglomerate Gucci Group, which was later absorbed by Kering, held a 50 per cent stake; she held the other half. (In March 2019, she completed a buyback of the Kering half. And in July, LVMH acquired a minority stake in Stella McCartney.)
