I was just thinking about how good so many of Stella McCartney’s guests looked in their Stella McCartney, which you can’t say of every brand’s front row, when one of them, Helen Mirren—Helen Mirren! I was beside myself, fanboying like crazy—got up dressed in her Stella suit, and black square-toed Stella pumps, a microphone in her hand, and began to speak. “Here come old flat-top, he come groovin’ up slowly, he got ju-ju eyeball, he one holy roller…” Mirren intoned. Oh hang on, I know this. It’s…. “He say, ‘I know you, you know me, one thing I can tell you is you got to be free….’” No, really, I do. It’s… it’s…. “Come together, right now, over me.” Well, duh, of course: It’s “Come Together” by The Beatles.
A look at the always informative The Stella Times, the newspaper McCartney distributes at every show, told us that come together is, yes, a double entendre—this is Stella McCartney, people, and as a Brit, I am here for her Brit humor. Yet more importantly for McCartney, the idea of come together is a statement about the uniting of people, and of us with the natural world, and from there, into McCartney’s own world, of fashion, and how its oppositions—masculine/feminine, structure/softness, rebellion and romance—can, and need to, co-exist.
McCartney’s collection played to all of this: The now McCartney-classic snappy wide shouldered suiting, some of it scissored away at the sides of the jackets, loosening up even more her roomy silhouette; the peplum shirts over wiiiiiide utility pants; softly Grès-like draped evening dresses dramatically contrasted with sculpted bodices; and, more of her brilliant (in both senses of the word) biodegradable sequins splashed over a jacket atop slouched up denims, or embellishing the front of cotton drill pants worn with a supersized tee.
Elsewhere, perusing McCartney’s paper also gave some background on two of the strongest elements of the collection: the jeans and the feathers. For the former, she used denim, woven with PURETECH, which, the notes said, “literally cleans the air we breathe.” It’s a material which could have uses, and implications, beyond fashion—though for now, its use in the standout jeans, one pair in striations of different blues, another with a curving back panel which looked like a denim jacket had been knotted at the waist, was very satisfying. As for the feathers, well, they weren’t. They were Fevvers, a plant based feather alternative, and lovely they looked, too, on Alex Consani, who fluttered down the runway to close the show in a strapless column dress in purple eco-plumage.
Of course, division is all we seem to live, breathe and experience these days, a gloomy, despondency-inducing state of affairs, and yes, you can say what good does raising this at a fashion do. But I for one am glad McCartney did; a rare acknowledgement that things are really quite desperate and dreadful, but speaking about it doesn’t detract from also celebrating creativity, and reminding us of some much needed joy and lightness. Quite the opposite. Come together, indeed.