Stella McCartney Brand Book

STELLA McCARTNEY
2SIEGLE
McCARTNEY
That’s an amazing rally and cry and just to light the fire further,
unless we decarbonize rapidly by 2050, this industry will
be responsible for ¼ or all carbon emissions and people will
not thank us for that.
I want to talk to you a little bit about your own brand because
obviously there’s been a conscious uncoupling with Kering,
if I can put it like that, and you were very much the poster
brand for environmental change under the house of Kering.
How does that affect your future going forward and your commitment
to sustainability? You probably don’t like that word
do you.
I love that word! I don’t think enough people really know what
it means. My commitment is at the core of my sort of birth
right if you like, and it’s at the core of everyone that works at
Stella McCartney as much as desirability and luxury in fashion,
we care. We do have that awful word that seems to be a
bit weird right now, we do have authenticity in our just basic
care for the planet and how we conduct ourselves in a more
conscious way in business. So that’s not going to change.
Imagine if I said I’m just going to stop and I’m going to make
plastic bottles. No, so we are fully committed to sustainability.
The Environmental Profit and Loss Index that we worked on
with Kering will continue and what we actually are working
on now is going deeper into that, because that was an amazing
source of data and finding out our impact on what we were
making and actually what that impact had on the planet. But
what we were getting was sort of wide information, so it didn’t
necessarily always apply to us and it wasn’t completely tailored
or personalized to us as a house. What we’re doing now is really
forming our own data and talking to our own supply chain and
our own sourcing and really tailoring it to our needs, so we get
a clearer idea of our impact.
[Reducing] greenhouse gases, is something we are very committed
to. That’s something that we can sort of talk about
with connection to the charter. Disclosing information and
having complete transparency is really important to us at Stella
McCartney. I think it’s something that has to become more
important to everybody in every industry quite frankly. And,
you know, manning up about the things we need help on because
we’re not perfect, some things we do have to do more
conventionally but the commitment there will be forever.
3
SIEGLE
You are doing some really ambitious stuff though that kind of
makes my heart sing as a nerdish ecologist, like regenerative
agriculture becoming part of your fashion landscape.
McCARTNEY
Yea! We are working really hard on regenerative agriculture.
You know, I grew up on an organic farm, we had arable farms,
and it’s funny because I now look at what I’m doing and I’m
like we’re basically farmers in the fashion industry. We’re just
kind of using soil, using land, cutting down forest, but we’re
not really putting back what we’re taking out. So, at Stella Mc-
Cartney we’re working very deeply on that. Obviously organic
cotton is a must for us but cotton is the biggest used material
in the fashion industry so you can go to that level, but the next
level and the most important level is the soil.
Basically, soil is the biggest creator of oxygen on the planet,
second to the sea. It’s a terrestrially, it’s the biggest creator of
carbon. So, we’re looking very intensely at our sourcing and
how we put nutrients back into the soil, how we take care of
that, how to avoid the dust and the soot. It’s really important
to farm in the proper way because it creates more and better-quality
oxygen.
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SIEGLE
You know this is a whole new world isn’t it? Fashion, farming,
can you see that you’ll be calling on soil biologists to be part
of your team before long?
McCARTNEY
I mean we do, the thing is, and it comes back to the charter,
we have to work as a team because I can’t do it all alone and I
have to work with the people we source from. We do it [work
with soil biologists and farmers] so much at Stella McCartney.
We spent two years working on viscose, for example. Over
150 million trees a year are cut down for viscose alone in the
fashion industry. These are from our rain forests; this is a huge
disaster not only for the planet and environment but also for
the inhabitants of the rain forest which we tend to forget. At
Stella McCartney, what we’ve done for many years now, is work
with the sourcing, getting sustainable forestry that we can work
with, taking the yarn, which is a completely different quality,
to our mills, the same luxury mills we all want to use in luxury
fashion, in Italy and all around the world, and giving them an
alternative yarn. It’s taken over two years to get a quality that
we are happy with. You know we are probably the only one in
the [fashion] industry using that viscose and it’s crazy! I think
that’s where I find hope with this idea of coming together for
the charter. I want to share that information and I don’t want
to have to do it alone.
5
SIEGLE
Let’s talk about this other new initiative that you’re here to
announce as well, the launch of Stella McCartney Cares Green.
We already have Stella McCartney Cares Pink and now we
have Green. Just explain what the components are and what
change that’s going to bring?
McCARTNEY
We launched Stella McCartney Cares Pink in October, which
is part of the arm of our charity that focuses on breast cancer
and breast cancer awareness. We designed a double mastectomy
bra a couple years ago and my big goal was to give them
away to everybody free, and actually in the first day, all of the
bras that we had went! Which is a great sign that we have that
reach that we can tell people about things, but also incredibly
depressing at the same time.
So, what we’re going to launch here today is the environmental
side of the foundation which is basically here to open source
and have a conversation on everything that we’ve studied and
spent so much time and love and energy learning about on
environmental issues in the fashion industry. I want to open
up that conversation and open up the information because I
think that there is so much confusion around what sustainably
means and what it means in the fashion industry, the second
most harmful [industry] on the planet, and how to get that
kind of conversation opening up by giving incentives.
It’s something that I find really strange about what I do, you
know my incentives have always been personal and I was always
pretty privileged to be able to not compromise in the way
that I went into the fashion industry and ran my business. But
I think trying to create some incentives like scholarships will
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