Stella McCartney’s Ryder Portraits handbag campaign continues with Dame Helen Mirren, photographed by Mary McCartney. The Academy Award winner joins an ongoing series that connects conscious design with cultural conviction — and the brand’s most luxurious cruelty-free bag.
Dame Helen Mirren opened Stella McCartney’s spring 2026 show at the Centre Pompidou last fall with a spoken-word rendition of The Beatles’ “Come Together,” as celebrities including Robin Wright and Dylan Penn, Ice Spice, Coco Jones, Cara Delevingne, and Jeff Koons watched from the front row. The 1969 anthem was recast as a call to collective responsibility. It set the tone for what followed, and for what comes next: Mirren now stars in Stella McCartney’s Ryder Portraits campaign, photographed by Mary McCartney.
The Ryder is Stella McCartney’s most elevated handbag, handcrafted in Italy from soft vegan leather alternatives — each bag’s curved silhouette assembled from hand-cut panels, shaped on a wooden mould, and finished with a functional lock in glimmering brass. Its spirit is drawn from the horse, the designer’s favorite animal, and the Summer 2026 version sits at the intersection of artisan craftsmanship and materials with an environmental impact up to 24 times lower than animal leather. McCartney has noted that in Bangladesh, 90 percent of tannery workers die before 50 from exposure to carcinogenic chemicals, and the artisans who make each Ryder were retrained to work with cruelty-free materials in their place.
Ryder Portraits
Ryder Portraits is an ongoing campaign series spotlighting friends of the brand — women who advocate for causes aligned with Stella McCartney’s mission. Mirren, an Academy Award-winning actress and committed advocate for women’s rights, education, and animal welfare, brings that same clarity of conviction to the campaign. The previous iteration starred Eva Mendes, establishing the series as a platform where culture, activism, and conscious design converge.
The collection she helped open was 98 percent sustainable and 100 percent cruelty-free, introducing world-first innovations including Fevvers, a plant-based alternative to feathers, and Pure.Tech, a programmable fabric engineered to absorb airborne pollutants. The collection also explored McCartney’s signature balance of eco-luxury and ’80s-inflected power dressing, its silhouettes moving from deconstructed Savile Row tailoring to sculptural satin gowns. “It’s about coming together — all humanity, all Mother Earth’s creatures — now more than ever,” McCartney said backstage.
Stella at the Met
The brand carried that momentum to the 2026 Met Gala earlier this month, dressing Katy Perry in a white strapless gown with a scorched frayed train and a mirrored face shield — a direct response to AI-generated images of Perry that had circulated widely during her public absence — alongside Simone Ashley in a draped silver-chain look and Greta Gerwig. Stella McCartney tied with Burberry for three placements at the Gala, a showing that underscores how much ground the house has covered without once compromising its cruelty-free ethos.
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