H&M Revives Stella McCartney Formula to Enhance Its Democratic Design Vision

H&M calls back Stella McCartney twenty years after their first collaboration. The Swedish group is finalizing a new joint collection with the British designer, which will go on sale next spring and with which it reinforces the strategy of allying with luxury names to gain credibility in designer fashion and democratize premium design.

Stella McCartney’s first capsule for H&M was launched in 2005, barely a year after the inaugural experiment in collaborations with the iconic Karl Lagerfeld. Since then, the group has been stringing together collaborations that have become hallmarks and examples of design accessible to the general public. Viktor&Rolf, Roberto Cavalli, Comme des Garçons, Lanvin, Versace, Isabel Marant, Balmain, Giambattista Valli, Simone Rocha, Mugler and Rabanne are some of the names that have already passed through the Swedish company’s studio. With these alliances, the group has accustomed its clientele to see catwalk names hanging on its hangers.

In this context, McCartney’s return is both a nod to the past and a way of updating the collaboration format. H&M recalls that that 2005 collection was its second alliance with a guest designer and now stresses that the new project is a twist on the format. The company intends these collaborations to be not only a capsule of impact, but also a platform to talk about sustainability. The British creative is one of the benchmarks in this area in the luxury segment.

According to the company, the collection will use certified materials, many of them recycled, as alternatives to conventional fabrics. The proposal will be built from McCartney’s archive, taking up codes from her brand and previous stages, with silhouettes for everyday wear and a vocabulary of lace, glitter and party dresses that refer to some of her hits of the 2000s.

H&M reinforces its strategy of signature collaborations with Stella McCartney.

The announcement is accompanied by the creation of an Insights Board, a working table with voices from different points of the value chain to discuss sustainability and test changes in the sector’s processes. The space aims to become a platform for discussion on innovation or practices that are more respectful of animal welfare, in line with the discourse that has accompanied McCartney since its beginnings.

The designer, for her part, has stressed the personal component of the project and that this second collaboration is an opportunity to measure how far fashion has come in terms of sustainability.

The company took advantage of the Fashion Awards in London, held last Monday, to announce the project, where several fashion and music celebrities wore some of the capsule looks for the first time. Amelia Gray, Anitta, Emily Ratajkowski and Yasmin Wijnaldum posed on the red carpet with designs from the future collection.

H&M closed the first nine months of its fiscal year with sales of 169,064 million Swedish kronor (15,317 million euros), down 1.8%, and a profit that fell another 9.8% to 7,753 million kronor (702.4 million euros), in the midst of restructuring its stores and with the impact of the exchange rate weighing down the turnover.