Stella McCartney’s Spring/Summer 2027 show took aim at industrial fishing, with Spiber’s fermented Brewed Protein fiber returning to her runway seven months after its debut.
Rain fell through Stella McCartney’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in the gardens of the British ambassador’s residence in Paris on September 30, the label’s 25th year without leather, fur, or feathers. “It’s war. We’re at war with the oceans,” McCartney said, according to the Associated Press, describing the collection built around the toll industrial fishing takes on marine life.
Fishing nets built to catch one species pull in dolphins and octopuses alongside it, with most of that bycatch thrown back dead, McCartney said. She questioned why some sea creatures are labeled food and others wildlife. “Who makes that decision?” she asked.
The certified wool McCartney uses is traced back to the farm it came from, and earlier this year she debuted sweaters knitted with Brewed Protein, a fermented wool alternative from the Japanese biotech company Spiber. It grows the fiber through precision fermentation rather than raising the goats, sheep, or silkworms conventional luxury textiles depend on, a shift the companies have described as “a structural transformation in the way materials are produced.” Brewed Protein can emit up to 75 percent fewer emissions than cashmere while requiring 94 percent less water and 86 percent less land to produce.
The clothes carried the ocean theme past the materials. Tailoring took its structure from Savile Row’s Edward Sexton, worked in a palette of seafoam, sage, coral, blush, and chocolate, while oversized blazers came cinched with drawstrings and peplums over sheer layering. Dolphins were airbrushed across T-shirts, hems traced the curl of a Hokusai wave, and evening gowns nodded to the draping of Madame Grès. Long-sleeved swimsuits were styled as eveningwear. The oceanographer Sylvia Earle, 91 and the holder of more than 7,000 hours underwater, appeared in a video message sent with the show’s invitations.
Getting fibers like Brewed Protein onto more than one runway is the harder problem, and McCartney has been working that side of it too. On September 23, she co-founded the Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition with Amazon and the forest-conservation nonprofit Canopy, pooling orders from more than 60 companies to bring down the cost of low-carbon materials. “Fashion has no shortage of ambition on sustainability. People are already looking for more sustainable options when they shop, and now the industry needs to deliver at scale,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “Through The Climate Pledge, we’re bringing together more than 60 fashion and retail brands, manufacturers, and innovators to help make that happen.”
“The solutions already exist. What’s been missing is the industry-wide commitment to help them scale,” McCartney said in the coalition’s launch announcement. She made a similar case about pricing a week later: “We need the big players to help scale it up and help the price points come into what they’re used to, because their margins are massive. My margins are tiny,” she told the Associated Press.
Jennifer Lopez watched from the front row under an umbrella, alongside Juliette Binoche, Karlie Kloss, and Miranda Kerr. “Everyone’s paid to go to shows, and it’s kind of a false economy,” McCartney said of the celebrity-heavy front row. She singled out Lopez as an exception. “She’s been such a pleasure,” McCartney said. “She is not the diva that you all thought she was.”
McCartney founded her label in 2001 after working at Chloé, banning animal-derived materials from the outset. The rest of Wednesday’s collection leaned on recycled and organic cotton and a black pigment drawn from algae rather than oil.
“It’s really, really important to want to wear the clothes. For me, that’s the main thing,” McCartney told the Associated Press. Asked to turn from the ocean back to the runway, she said, “You mean you want to talk about the clothes?”
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