As a child, Stella McCartney would sit on the floor of her parents’ shared wardrobe in their North London home, a stone’s throw from Abbey Road Studios, pulling together outfits and admiring the garments all lined up together, her mother’s glittery platform boots next to her father’s Converse sneakers.
On the farm in Kintyre, Scotland, where the family spent much of its time and were early adopters of organic and nature-friendly practices, her parents’ sartorial choices also left an impression. There were the Fair Isle jumpers, kilts, and Wellington boots favored by her father, Beatles legend Paul McCartney. There were the culottes and cowboy boots her late mother, photographer, musician, and animal-rights activist Linda McCartney, wore while riding her Appaloosa horse. And then there were the costumes—including those glittery boots—her parents wore onstage while touring with their band Wings, Stella and her siblings in tow.
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“That really influenced me massively, like everything I’ve done from day one till now, this blending of gender, this blending and shared wardrobe, the masculine and feminine,” she says. That’s not all she picked up: she listened to conversations at the kitchen table about the requirements and challenges of getting organic certification from Britain’s Soil Association, imbibing what it involves to be a pioneering environmentalist. That childhood sowed the seeds of the ethical stance the fashion designer has become known for, she tells me when we meet as London Fashion Week kicks off on a cool February afternoon. She’s dressed in an impeccably tailored gray striped suit from her Spring 2026 ready-to-wear collection, made of responsibly sourced wool, her peplum jacket cinched at the waist with a brown belt. “Growing up with animals all around me and not eating animals, not killing them, I began to make connections that I think were more with the planet,” says McCartney.
Photograph by Emma Hardy for TIME
And so, when it came to putting on her Winter 2026 show at Paris Fashion Week in early March, the self-professed “horse girl” chose a riding hall in the Bois de Boulogne. There, 13 pure Spanish horses (seven white and six brown) moved in choreographed patterns throughout the show, as models walked an oval catwalk around the perimeter to the sounds of a carefully curated playlist featuring the haunting music of Icelandic singer Björk. In the spirit of the Chinese zodiac this year, McCartney, 54, is “leaning into the fiery horse,” she says. Seeing these majestic creatures up close is a reminder of what is at stake. “Billions and billions [of animals] are killed every year for handbags and shoes and jackets. It’s kind of ridiculous,” she says. “And I’m showing there is an alternative.”
As the fashion house celebrates its 25th anniversary, the collection, which the brand says is made from 93% sustainable materials, is a journey through McCartney’s own life, featuring fisherman rib knits that nod to her childhood in Kintyre, while bejeweled corsets and dresses, and ultra-realistic faux-fur trimmed suits conjure 1980s Christian Lacroix and Yves Saint Laurent, where she interned as a teenager in Paris. Despite the nostalgia, McCartney’s approach is decidedly futuristic: the collection includes pieces made using leather alternatives derived from wine-grape waste, algae-based vegan pigments, and a vegan wool alternative made from fermented plant matter.
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McCartney has established herself as a leader in sustainable, cruelty-free fashion, pioneering innovative alternatives to animal-based materials and sharing her expertise to encourage others to do the same. And this year she’s getting even more prestigious recognition for her work. The day after her Paris show, she is awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious order of merit, by President Emmanuel Macron in celebration of her contributions to fashion, sustainability, and animal welfare. It comes just days after she is named an ambassador of King Charles III’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, a private-sector-led coalition focused on accelerating the transition to a sustainable future.
As the daughter of a Beatle, her family’s fame isn’t something she can easily escape, nor is she seeking to. Lately, her social media algorithms have been showing her even more photos and videos of her early life than usual. A new documentary, Man on the Run, focuses on her father’s life in the 1970s and her parents’ band, Wings. And a four-part Beatles biopic is in the works. Having those constant reminders is “kind of surreal,” but it’s also her North Star if she ever questions her identity as a designer. “That’s my point of difference—on my sustainability, my heritage, my Britishness, my Americanness: these are aspects that I don’t share with any other fashion designer or any other fashion house.” So she’s leaning into it. A tank top in her latest collection bears the slogan My Dad Is a Rock Star that recalls the iconic Rock Royalty tops she dressed herself and Liv Tyler in for the 1999 Met Gala.
It hasn’t always been easy. When she began working in the fashion industry in Paris, not long after graduating in 1995 from London’s Central Saint Martin’s college, she was ridiculed as an “eco weirdo” for refusing to use animal skins or feathers, she says.
“She wouldn’t violate her ethics. She’s compassionate, and she was going to make that shine through, sink or swim,” says Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which named McCartney Person of the Year in 2024.
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McCartney says she has infiltrated from within: “I think I’ve changed a lot of minds and opened a lot of doors for other people that want to work that way.”
By 1997 she had become creative director of French fashion house Chloé, and met the designer Tom Ford while she worked there. When Ford was looking for brands and designers to bring into what would become luxury-brand conglomerate Kering, McCartney was an obvious choice. “I was incredibly impressed with her as a designer and she was beginning to have a real influence on fashion,” he says. “But she was also ahead of the rest of the fashion industry by at least a decade with her commitment to sustainability and cruelty-free fashion.” In 2001 she launched the Stella McCartney fashion house under a 50-50 joint venture with the group. She bought Kering’s stake back in 2018 and entered a partnership with another luxury conglomerate, LVMH, the following year.
There is still much work to be done to make the fashion industry “cleaner” and “less barbaric,” she says. Her mother used to say that if abattoirs had glass walls, nobody would eat meat. “And I think the fashion industry is hidden and dark, and there’s a lot of bad stuff going on,” she says. “We’re supposed to be about beauty and escape.”
McCartney is now launching an initiative to bring fashion brands, suppliers, and innovators together with policymakers and other stakeholders to incentivize design that has a lower climate impact, targeting net-zero emissions by 2040. This includes mobilizing finance and working directly with suppliers to make this goal commercially achievable. “The fashion industry is one of the most harmful to the planet out of all the industries, and we don’t seem to have any concrete legislation or policies that prevent us from being so dirty and harmful to the planet,” she says. “So it’s critical.”
She also talks about the possibility of imposing limits on the number of animals killed for use in the fashion industry. According to PETA, more than a billion animals are killed for leather alone each year.
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Like many in the luxury sector, her label has faced challenging market conditions, reporting a pretax loss of around $38 million in 2024, its most recently filed accounts. Yet she emphasizes that sustainability and profitability are compatible. There should be no shame in making money while prioritizing morals, she says. “I think that business people are good people, and I think they want to change,” she says. “They just need to be made to change by politicians and law, because what I do is very difficult, and I’ve made it look easy because I’ve been doing it for over 30 years.”
She admits that making garments using sustainable materials can be costly. When she became the first designer to use Fevvers, the plant-based, naturally dyed alternatives that look and behave like ostrich feathers, in her summer 2026 runway show last year, it was a proof of concept rather than a commercial endeavor. For McCartney, that sacrifice was worth it to draw attention from investors and buyers to such material innovations, which could make or break a startup like Fevvers.
“It’s put us on the map in a way that we couldn’t have ever imagined,” says Fevvers co-founder James West. “Nearly every leading name in fashion brands has been in touch.” The startup has also received accolades and wide press coverage. “That’s all worth its weight in gold.”
When McCartney used Radiant Matter’s plant-derived, biodegradable iridescent BioSequin to embroider a jumpsuit modeled by Cara Delevingne in Vogue in 2023, it helped the startup show its value proposition to investors and potential partners, says Radiant Matter CEO Elissa Brunato. McCartney understands innovation cycles and the challenges these startups face, Brunato says. She has the patience to work on their timelines but also the enthusiasm to get their products out of labs, onto garments, and in front of eyes.
But she is also keen to innovate at the mass-market level. She’s collaborating with Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M for a second time. For her, it’s a way to showcase more-sustainable options at accessible prices—even as she acknowledges fast fashion’s pitfalls. According to the Global Fashion Agenda, the equivalent of a garbage truckload of clothes is burned or buried in landfill every second.
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But, she says, people still come up to her in the street and tell her they have held onto items they bought from her 2005 H&M collection. She hopes to repeat that success, creating garments that are kept or resold rather than tossed aside. “I know it will become an investment for people,” she says. “And that is a really exciting conversation to have with fast fashion.” The collection, which goes on sale in the spring, will feature certified, responsible materials, including many that are recycled. As part of the partnership, a new “Insights Board” of industry representatives will be formed, focusing on animal welfare and supporting sustainable innovations. Ann-Sofie Johansson, head of design and creative adviser at H&M, says using organic cottons and recycled materials in 2005 felt radical, but it has become “really standard practice for so much of what we do at H&M.” According to its 2024 sustainability report, the company now uses 89% recycled or sustainably sourced materials, with a goal of 100% by 2030.
In 2025, McCartney repurchased LVMH’s 49% minority stake in her fashion house, becoming fully independent, but remains an adviser to LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and the group’s executive team on sustainability issues. “I’m a very independent person,” she says, “and it just became the right time for me.”
That independence is clear in her hands-on approach, whether that’s working with the suppliers of sustainable materials, styling models for the runway, or getting “very involved” in the musical choices for her shows. “My ear, I guess, is trained pretty precisely on the musical experience,” she says. “I can be a nightmare, I’m sure!”
Perhaps her fastidiousness is no surprise, given the attention her brand gets. The front row at her Paris show is studded with stars including Oprah Winfrey, Anna Wintour, Edward Enninful, and her supportive father. After the show, VIPs pour into an unusual backstage area: a courtyard by the stables. The horses from the show mill around nearby as glasses of champagne are served. McCartney holds court next to an aesthetically piled stack of hay bales, graciously taking selfies with one person after another: celebrities, influencers, fashionistas, stable staff. “Eco weirdo” no more. She brings her dad out to enjoy the horses up close, posing together for photos bathed in the golden-hour light.
Reflecting on what her legacy will be, McCartney says the concept is “a heavy thought in my particular family. Do you buy into that legacy thing, or do you just go, ‘F-ck that, we’re all gonna die and who cares?’” She’d much rather focus on the here and now. “I would like to think that I’m trying to contribute in a positive way to my time here, and as a female-founded British brand in fashion, doing things very differently,” she muses. “I hope to inspire and just let other people know that you can have a business model that works in that way... I think it’s a much nicer way to work."
