Exclusive: Stella McCartney Will Be Attending COP28
Ahead of the arrival “Stella’s Sustainable Market: Innovating Tomorrow’s Solutions,” Bazaar Arabia speaks with the fashion world’s most high-profile sustainable designer to ask what the industry needs to do now
Stella McCartney is on the phone from the back of a taxi. She’s on her way to an evening engagement and despite our appointment falling late in the day, she’s energised and ready to share all her thoughts on fashion’s impact on the planet.
As luxury brands prepare to take a place around the table at COP28 in Dubai this month, Stella seems keen for the fashion world to step up and take responsibility for its role in the climate crisis. “Fashion is the second most harmful industry in the world,” she shares. “Every single second a truckload of fast fashion is burned or buried. People wear things up to two times before they just throw it away! I personally try not to tell anyone what to do, but I try instead to give them information and insight into another option,” adds the designer.
Stella McCartney To Attend COP28
The British designer will be attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference, unveiling Stella’s Sustainable Market: Innovating Tomorrow’s Solutions exhibit (located near the Slovenia Pavilion), which will be open throughout the two-week event.
“After attending COP26 in Glasgow a couple of years ago and seeing how little the fashion industry was represented, despite it being one of the most polluting industries in the world, I was very keen to attend COP28 in Dubai this year to showcase what has been achieved in that little time, and highlight what the future could look like if governments were to start taking the fashion industry seriously,” she tells Harper’s Bazaar Arabia.
“This year we are partnering with LVMH to showcase the tremendous progress being made in material innovation by hosting ‘Stella’s Sustainable Market: Innovating Tomorrow’s Solutions’ exhibit which will champion 15 industry leading start-ups and innovators in fashion and beyond who will have their incredible new materials on display for attendees (both the public and official COP delegates) to engage with and discover.”
She reveals how the exhibit will feature breakthrough regenerative, bio and plant-based alternatives to plastic, animal leather, and traditional fibers to groundbreaking carbon negative materials for building and other applications. “These organisations and materials we have chosen to work with will offer just a small glimpse into the incredible global efforts underway to reimagine some of the most foundational elements of our economy,” she adds.
“COP offers a global platform that is attended by governments, diplomats, business leaders, environmentalists, influencers and the media. This year we have the unique opportunity as a brand to showcase the future of the fashion industry through our exhibit that will run over the whole two weeks of the summit,” Stella says. “Our exhibit offers a profound glimpse into ground-breaking advancements in sustainable materials, transcending the boundaries of the fashion industry, poised to reshape industries and redefine our relationship with the planet. Materials that not only reduce harm but heal, that aren’t just sustainable but regenerative. I am excited to have this opportunity to show other business leaders that you can do it, that there are viable solutions out there and most importantly I hope it will inspire others to take risks, just like we do every day at Stella McCartney.”
“I plan to continue the conversations started at COP. For me, this is isn’t a one-time event that I will attend and then forget about when I leave Dubai, I want to continue pushing for change once the event is over. For me, the collective ambition is to sculpt actionable frameworks, policies and partnerships that could substantially diminish the global environmental toll exerted by business at large, and I think I can play a role in helping to achieve this in the fashion industry and beyond. I want to see a future where global industries can operate together within eco-friendly paradigms.
Fashion is well-known to be one of the most polluting industries in the world so having presence at COP28 feels absolutely essential.
Stella McCartney
Since launching her eponymous brand in 2001, Stella McCartney has been pioneering that other way. From being adamant about prioritising animal welfare (leather, fur, skins and animal glue have been absent from the label’s products since day one), Stella McCartney is where luxury shoppers turn when they want to wear their ethics on their sleeve.
“Animal agriculture accounts for approximately 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the transport industry at 13%. This is where leather comes from. Not only is leather driving the destruction of our rainforests by creating land for cattle, but it is also releasing almost 300kg of toxic chemicals into the environment which are also entering local water systems. Leather also needs to be tanned with carcinogenic chemicals that drastically shorten the lives of factory workers, often in the most impoverished nations. It is cruel on every level,” Stella says. “Over 1 billion animals are raised and killed to supply leather to the fashion industry every year, so for me the single most important thing for the public, businesses and governments to focus on is animal agriculture and how it impacts our environment and industry.”
Each season has seen new innovations in – and omissions from – the collections, including going PVC-free in 2010; the launch of Fur Free Fur in 2015; and the world’s first commercially available Mylo handbag – made from a mycelium-based animal leather alternative – in 2022.
It seems that the fashion world is finally catching up with the realisation that urgent changes to conventional processes are needed – something that Stella has always campaigned for.
How does Stella feel now more people validate a viewpoint she has held her entire life?
“I’m still pinching myself that I’m not being ridiculed… I’m a fairly modest person… but I’m in a weird state where I’m watching the world, and my industry, trying to catch up. It’s surreal… my work [has been] trying to convince people [there is an] alternative to animal agriculture. My family has been having this conversation in the public eye my entire life. The reason I’m doing what I do is not to make money or to massage my ego or have me feeling great because I’m a pioneer, I’m just trying to change an industry, a perception and open a mindset,” says Stella.
Opening mindsets is exactly what Stella’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection (which showed in Paris in October) was designed to do. Ninety five per cent of the ready-to-wear looks are crafted from responsible materials – it’s Stella’s most conscious collection to date – and it was presented around an immersive concept named Stella’s Sustainable Market.
When it comes to planning the new season, Stella admits, “It’s always ‘Why would I do something?’ Why would anyone have another fashion show? Why do we need that? Unless I have a very important reason to create and to contribute, I’m not going to do it. All I’m trying to do with the brand is use my voice and my platform in fashion to sell sustainability. So I thought, let’s give the people that we work with… a place at the table.” And so, suppliers, manufacturers, scientists and innovators populated the show space in a tree-lined side-street with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. “As a brand, we’re very obviously connected to nature… We found this incredible market space and we had beaming sunshine. It was like Mother Earth was happy.”
After customers, press and buyers perused the stalls (which included stands from Keel Labs, who developed Kelsun, a seaweed-based yarn making it’s first appearance on a luxury catwalk; and high quality deadstock sourcing platform Nona Source) the market opened to the general public. When climate anxiety is at an all-time high, sharing innovations in such a experiential environment could be key to further sustainable successes.
“I think it’s agreed that if you’re aggressively telling people off… it never goes down very well. If we try and evolve that, giving people a conscious conversation and also hearing why they don’t want… a nonleather bag… or why they want to eat so much meat… it’s a two-way conversation. In my own career, it’s only now that I’m not being met with anger. It wasn’t accepted that I could even open up an alternative conversation. But I think you’ve got to just come at it with a gentle hand and hope for the best,” reflects the designer.
Of course it helps that the end product is always utterly desirable and exactly what women want to wear.
Stella looked to her own personal archive for inspiration and bought cherished pieces into the collection. A black Wings T-shirt, worn over a puff-sleeve white shirt, slick black trousers (she does the best tailored trousers) and a bejewelled cummerbund was a joy.
“For me, the ultimate collection of my mum and dad’s life coming together was their wardrobe. It was very gender-fluid. My dad wore my mum’s things, my mum wore my dad’s things. It was very contemporary in that respect. It shows that fashions always come back and you can’t really go wrong with a great vintage T-shirt,” she exclaims. Or a great pair of jeans? Stella reveals, “One of my favourite looks on the runway was the mirrored denim jeans.”
But what should fashion do next? “I believe something’s better than nothing. I’m a firm believer, obviously, in reducing your meat intake one day a week (for Meat Free Monday) but there’s a responsibility on the heads of these companies, the people that are sitting in the boardrooms. I do believe they have to make moral decisions. It can’t all be about the bank balance. There has to be brave decisions being made. There has to be brave policy change. I think a lot it is out of our hands, but a lot is in our hands,” says Stella. Let’s choose to hold onto that power.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s November 2023 issue.