Oct. 1, 2025

Stella McCartney’s Coming Together

WORDS ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN

STELLA MCCARTNEY

Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Stella McCartney Spring/Summer 2026 collection.

There was a rumor going around the Centre Pompidou that the reason Stella McCartney’s show wasn’t starting on time was because we were waiting for Johnny Depp to arrive. He never did, but she wasn’t short on stars, from Paris Jackson to Cara Delevingne and Daphne Guinness. On the new Paris schedule – which has been given its first total shake-up in over a decade – McCartney moves from a morning slot to evening. On Tuesday night, which marked her first show since she bought back her brand from LVMH, it felt a lot like she is repositioning her show as a big event on the Paris calendar, with all the celebrities, crowds of screaming fans, and show-stopping eveningwear moments that territory calls for.

Case in point: Dame Helen Mirren opened the show, taking to the runway in a gray suit to recite the lyrics to The Beatles’ Come Together: “Here come old flat-top, he come groovin’ up slowly. He got ju-ju eyeball, he one holy roller. He got hair down to his knee. Got to be a joker, he just do what he please.” Something as rare as a cool unification anthem, the rock song means a lot to many different generations. In a six-degrees observation, it was also recorded by Michael Jackson, whose daughter was in the audience. Paris grew up co-owning the rights to the song via the catalog her father left to his heirs, until his estate sold its stake to Sony in 2016. New generations of McCartneys and Jacksons come together, too.

“The interesting thing about this song, and why I wanted to use it, is that there are so many double entendres in it. I love that there’s humor and bit of sort of slutty sex in it. I love that there’s the coming together of all humanity: all of Mother Earth’s creatures. It was written so many years ago. For me, as a child growing up, it was John’s song,” McCartney said after the show, referring to her father Paul’s songwriting partner John Lennon. “It meant the same then as it does now. I wanted to show that we haven’t moved on properly. This still is so important, now more than ever.”

STELLA MCCARTNEY

How did its message reflect on the fashion industry where this Beatle’s daughter makes her mark? “I think it’s time to come together and understand what we’re doing as an industry, and wake up. But also just make things look precious and beautiful and escape into a dream: the fashion dream. Now, more than ever, we need to come together and say who we are through what we wear,” she said. She conveyed that ethically sourced fashion dream in creations that drew on the visual grammar of haute couture – big puff balls and bouncy surface decorations – crafted from both naive evocations of feathers and cutting-edge innovations that truly looked like real plume.

“All those light feather-looking things you just saw are actually blades of grass naturally dyed,” McCartney explained backstage. “It’s very delicate but at the end of the day, feathers being plucked from a bird are more delicate. I think it’s weird that that’s the norm.” McCartney mixed up her eveningwear statements with broad-shouldered tailoring and tops with sustainable sequins either grown in labs or made of seaweed. If the show signified the turning of a new leaf for her brand, which she now fully owns again, the message was a reminder that Stella McCartney isn’t only a “sustainable designer”. She’s a good time – and a glitzy time – with the wardrobe to prove it.