Stella McCartney believes our style shouldn’t come at the expense of our values; it should reflect them. A lifelong vegetarian, her fashion house does without animal products including leather, feathers, and fur in any designs, instead leveraging innovative materials. “We’ve worked with spider silk that’s grown in labs. We’ve made handbags out of mushrooms, and we’ve turned apple waste into shoes,” McCartney said on stage in London on March 26, as she received a TIME Earth Award, presented by her friend, actor and producer Cate Blanchett.
McCartney’s use of novel materials often comes with a high price tag, while some are yet to make it off the runway—like Fevvers, the plant-based, naturally dyed alternatives that look and behave like ostrich feathers. But McCartney, whose fashion house celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, sees it as a long-term bet. “We’re investing in innovators who are reshaping the future of materials,” she said.
Her influence has already transcended the insular world of high fashion, boasting collaborations with H&M and Adidas. In 2012, the year London hosted the Summer Olympics, she became the first fashion designer to design apparel for the country’s team across all competitions.
The daughter of Beatles legend Paul McCartney, Stella spent her childhood between London and a farm in Scotland where her parents were early adopters of organic practices. “I was blessed to grow up in a family that loved and respected the natural world,” she said. But she also saw humanity’s disregard for “the planet and its creatures.” She said that tension shaped her.
McCartney did not hold back in calling out the fashion industry. “Every second, a truckload of textiles is burned or buried,” she said. “Hundreds of millions of trees are felled for clothing fibers. Toxic chemicals used in leather tanning seep into rivers and into human bodies. And billions of animals are slaughtered in the name of ‘luxury.’” Her pitch is that doing right by the planet and the animals is also better for humans, since “the same hidden industries that exploit animals also endanger workers, pollute communities, and strip away dignity.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way, she said. “We can—and we must—do better.”