There are people who are utterly galled by the good fortune of others. Then there are those who feel uplifted by it, walking away with a smile on their lips, and a song in their hearts (preferably something in the vein of The Beatles). Stella McCartney's sane, human response to a life that has been anything but ordinary is some kind of model of how to thrive in the lowering shadow of a legend.
It's easy to say that, at 40, McCartney has it all: the fabulous legacy (the product of one of music's most famously loving and lasting unions, between her mother, Linda, and her father, Paul); the handsome, accomplished husband (Alasdhair Willis is a design guru in London); four adorable children; and a fashion business that has grown by leaps and bounds, creatively and commercially, since she founded it in 2001. But you have to balance that against the loss of her mother to breast cancer in 1998, an emotional catastrophe that brings her to tears even now. And considering the insane pressures and prejudices that are attached to her name, having it all seems less a birthright and more a hard-won trophy.
McCartney works hard for the money. It helps that when she signed her deal with Gucci Group (now PPR Group) more than 10 years ago, she had the smarts to demand that it be an equal parternship. It's an ethically minded business, founded on her mother's vegetarian principles, which makes her something of a Trojan horse in the luxury-fashion industry, more so because her collections—Spring's short, supersexy graphic prints being a case in point-press so many of-the-moment buttons.
This year sees McCartney hoisted high as creative director of Team Great Britain for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, overseeing every single look that every single athlete will wear in competition. Thankfully, she has a gift for high-performance athleticism. There's her longtime Adidas collaboration to attest to that. There was also the show McCartney staged during London Fashion Week this past February, where she presented a special collection of eveningwear with an extravagant display of supermodel hyperkineticism. Bodies were thrown every which way like gorgeous rag dolls. It was one of the most unhinging, exciting things I've seen in years. It was also a valuable reminder that the art of surprise is one of fashion's most valuable assets.We sat down over lunch a few days after her London show to talk about life's other surprises.
TIM BLANKS: One thing I love about fashion is that there is still this capacity for amazing surprises. Do you feel like that about what you do?
STELLA MCCARTNEY: My biggest surprises in my everyday job have to do with the challenges of trying to be slightly more responsible as a brand. My big surprises are when I say, "That fair-trade knitwear we did last season in Peru, I want to do it again," and someone else says, "Okay, it rained for two months and that factory sat on a mountaintop and it doesn't exist anymore."
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