Stella McCartney’s Paris show made wool the odd one out

Paris fashion week has a talent for mistaking spectacle for substance. Stella McCartney, at least, has the courtesy to admit what she is doing: using the runway to argue, again, that cruelty should not be dressed up as tradition. Her latest show, staged in the gardens of the British embassy in Paris, came with a zero-wool promise and a collection that looked to the sea rather than the pasture.

McCartney said she was proud that there was no wool on the runway this season. She has spent 30 years talking about animal rights at fashion week, usually as something of a lone voice, but the issue has re-entered the headlines after the outcry over a Peta protester being physically restrained at a catwalk show by Steven Kolb, the president of New York fashion week’s governing body. Wool cruelty, once a side issue compared with fur, is suddenly less easy for the industry to ignore.

Her answer is partly technical and partly moral. McCartney has been working on wool alternatives, including Brewed Protein, a fermented substitute for cashmere and wool developed with the Japanese biotech firm Spiber and first used in her collections a year ago. She also said the matter is not entirely black and white: she has alpacas at home and has to shear them, and she accepts that wool can be responsibly sourced. The problem, in her view, is how much of today’s production is deeply cruel, and how much work it takes to monitor the difference. At Stella, she says, everything is policed from start to finish at her cost and on her time, and when she does use wool she can show exactly where it comes from.

The front row added the usual layer of celebrity theatre. Jennifer Lopez arrived in faux fur, with a skirt suit trimmed in it and a matching stole, while Juliette Binoche was also there. Paparazzi, predictably, seemed more interested in the photograph than in the argument, which is the sort of thing fashion calls a contradiction and then monetises.

This season’s clothes were steeped in ocean imagery. A model wore a sea life-themed sweater, Miranda Kerr appeared in an ocean-themed dress, and the collection included fancy long-sleeved swimsuits worn as evening looks. Dolphins turned up on T-shirts, and the cursive hems of party dresses echoed Hokusai waves. The invitation came through a video message from Sylvia Earle, the 91-year-old oceanographer who has spent more than 7,000 hours underwater.

McCartney’s point was blunt, and not especially decorative. She said the world is at war with the oceans and the creatures living in them, and argued that for every fish eaten, countless others are thrown back dead. The line is severe, but then the industry has long preferred a polished conscience to the inconvenience of checking where its materials come from. McCartney at least has chosen the inconvenience.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com