Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney is an English fashion designer, the daughter of former Beatles member Paul McCartney, who designed her first jacket at thirteen, interned for Christian Lacroix, worked for Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton, and graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1995. This page is the front door to that record in this guide: from here, the series opens out into the collections filed season by season, the fall and spring strands taken separately, the fashion week and runway coverage of the shows themselves, the running news record, and the profiles page where the designer's record is set out in full.

Stella Nina McCartney is an English fashion designer. She is the daughter of former Beatles member Paul McCartney. McCartney became interested in designing clothes as a youth. At age thirteen, she designed her first jacket. Three years later, she interned for Christian Lacroix, working on her first haute couture collection, honing her skills working for Edward Sexton, her father's Savile Row tailor for a number of years. She studied her foundation at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, followed by Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in the early 1990s: she graduated in 1995. Her graduation collection was modelled by friends and supermodels Naomi Campbell, Yasmin Le Bon and Kate Moss at the graduation runway show, and the entire collection was sold to Tokyo, a London boutique; the designs were licensed to Browns, Joseph, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. The search routes in the references run Stella McCartney news, photo and video searches, and the designer's official website is linked there as well. Readers who already know the strand they want — a season, a show, the biography — can go straight to it from the series links on this page.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

One Designer, Many Views

A designer of this standing cannot be covered honestly in a single summary, because the work operates on several levels at once. There is the garment level — tailoring learned at first hand — haute couture construction at Christian Lacroix and bespoke cutting with Edward Sexton, her father's Savile Row tailor — which the collections and product pages examine piece by piece. There is the show level, where each season's argument is made in sequence under lights, which the runway and fashion week pages follow. And there is the biographical level, the training, accidents and decisions that explain why the clothes look the way they do, which belongs to the profiles page. This main page exists to keep those levels connected rather than to repeat any one of them.

The signature that runs through every level is confident modern tailoring with a feminine ease — the design language she developed from her teenage first jacket through the Central Saint Martins graduation collection that was sold to a Tokyo boutique and licensed to Browns, Joseph, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. It is recognizable in a single photograph and in a full season alike, which is precisely why the record rewards being read whole: the same hand appears in the earliest work and in the most recent collections, and the series is arranged so a reader can trace it — from the main routes here, into a season, onto the runway, and back to the life on the profiles page.

How to Use This Guide

Start here if you are arriving fresh: the links above the references divide the record by kind — news for the current story, photos and videos for the visual record, the named pages for the filed one. The Photos section gathers the imagery carried with this page, and the reference searches are kept current by the search engines themselves, so a story published this week is reachable from a page whose filed record may end earlier. Dates matter for the same reason: a photograph from an early season can illustrate coverage of any later one, and the season pages are the corrective.

For the background the headlines assume, the profiles page is the essential companion — it carries the dates, places and turning points in order. For the work itself, the collections page files the seasons, and the fall and spring pages separate the two registers of the tailored signature restated in every season. Read together, the pages in this series give a complete working picture of Stella McCartney: the life, the clothes, the shows and the coverage, each in its own place.