Stella McCartney was the first designer showing in Paris to question the status quo of the luxury fashion market. She made vegan (synthetic, faux leather or whatever you want to call it) bags and shoes seem desirable. She used her hugely privileged position to champion the rights of animals when the rest of the fashion world didn’t care.
Then she turned her attention to ecology. Again, through an advantageous position at LVMH (which owns 49 per cent of her business) McCartney was able to invest in innovative environmentally-friendly fabric startups and highlight their work at her shows. It doesn’t hurt that she can always attract a stellar front row to lend glamour to her cause – this time, Greta Gerwig, Juliette Binoche, Natalie Portman (all carrying the new Stella McCartney bag), Tom Daley and a Ken-esque Rob Lowe.
Let’s not forget either, she has always made great trouser suits and sold them for less than, say, McQueen, Saint Laurent or Brioni. How many women got their first taste of accessible, Savile Row power tailing through Stella McCartney?
All this to say she’s achieved some considerable triumphs. I wish I liked what she showed this morning more.
Apart from some interesting looking fabrics – those exploding shoulder puff-capes – it was notably thin on ideas. If you take the immensely oversized, Balenciaga-esque shoulders out of the equation – and somebody should, because despite repeated outings on the catwalks, almost no one is wearing them and most designers have moved on – you can see that most of what made this mildly engaging was the styling and the setting, which was open air in a bourgeois Parisian street in the 7th arrondissement. The venue was a rare note of reality.
True, there were a couple of sheer lace or floaty Grecian Goddess red carpet dresses, but nothing we haven’t previously seen variations of. There should be lots here for grown up working women, but apart from a decent rectangular, boxy bag, there isn’t. In several sizes, with a dip at the top, it might boost her sales – but it has a lot of competition, not least from a host of other brands who’ve also added this feature to their bags (it’s fair, Toteme started it).
This house, with its founder’s commitment to making high fashion that doesn’t wreck the planet, should be a road map for others. I hope it finds its way again soon.
North of the Seine, Aussie Nicky Zimmermann was also in a floaty mood, as per. The difference here is you see plenty of real women wearing Zimmermann dresses (they’re hotly traded on vintage sites too).They’re never too sheer or too revealing.
For every mini there’s a midi or a maxi, for every cutaway dress there’s a Victorian-inspired counterpart.
It’s a sunny brand that makes unpretentious, feminine, flirtatious clothing and, for Spring, layers them under parkas or soft safari jackets (a way of dressing that Stella McCartney did so much to revive in the late 1990s and early noughties). Add some squishy and fringed bags and, like McCartney’s, this is a brand for party girls with attitude. But at Zimmerman they know they can also get a trench or a blazer with normal sized shoulders.
