Stella McCartney’s Shop With Stella Winter 2025 merges livestream shopping with luxury fashion, blending Eva Mendes’ star power, sustainability, and QVC‑style immediacy in a new digital stage.
Stella McCartney’s new digital shopping series, Shop With Stella: Winter 2025, launches this week with Eva Mendes as co‑host. The format blends fashion show, interactive Q&A, and live shopping, placing luxury fashion in a setting more familiar to QVC or late‑night television. From a fictional corporate office dubbed STELLACORP, McCartney and Mendes style sharp‑shouldered dresses, Ryder totes, and mycelium‑based vegan snakeskin pieces while viewers shop along in real time. It’s both theatrical and transactional, a reflection of how luxury retail is experimenting with entertainment as much as with design.
McCartney’s Winter 2025 collection was unveiled at Paris Fashion Week, but Shop With Stella brings it into London headquarters and onto screens worldwide. The collection is 96 percent crafted from what the brand calls conscious materials, including Savile Row tailoring cut from more responsible fabrics and accessories developed with plant‑based alternatives. Mendes has appeared in McCartney’s past two campaigns, but here she takes on a role closer to collaborator, guiding viewers through looks with a levity that softens the distance between celebrity and consumer.
The shift toward shoppable shows is measurable. eMarketer projects that 21.7 percent of U.S. digital buyers will make a livestream purchase in 2025. Meanwhile, the global livestream commerce market is expected to expand from roughly $2 trillion this year to more than $3.7 trillion by 2030, with China leading the growth and the U.S. climbing fastest at nearly 47 percent annually. That Stella McCartney would invest in this format is less a surprise than an inevitability: fashion houses are searching for ways to hold attention in a digital environment where static product shots no longer suffice.
A digital stage for luxury
Live shopping is no longer confined to mass‑market retailers. Zara, which first experimented with livestreaming in China, has expanded to Europe and the U.S., blending fashion shows and backstage clips into its shopping app. Net‑a‑Porter now runs Net‑a‑Porter Live, where stylists host themed sessions that customers can shop instantly. Poshmark Live runs a similar model. In watches and jewelry, the 1916 Company created 1916 Live, a weekly event featuring experts who walk audiences through limited‑release pieces, some offered exclusively through the livestream before hitting broader distribution.
For McCartney, the medium suits both her interest in innovation and her longstanding critique of fashion’s reliance on spectacle without substance. In past interviews she has underlined that rejecting leather and fur is not a side detail but central to reimagining the industry: “If you really mean it, stop using leather, full stop, and then you’ll see a massive, massive change in the industry’s environmental impact,” she told Vogue. Bringing that conviction into a format where audiences can ask questions in real time allows her to reinforce the link between design and values in a way that a runway alone cannot.
The QVC effect on fashion
The comparisons to QVC are notable; hosts, banter, shoppable products appearing live. But what McCartney is building has more in common with television as performance art than with a straightforward sales channel. The STELLACORP set borrows the look of a workplace sitcom, with Mendes and McCartney leaning into a playfulness that entertains while it sells. “It’s an exclusive insight into my headquarters and history — told by me, in my words,” McCartney said. “I want to bring everyone into my world, which is something we’ve never done for a collection, and really is pioneering a new way of digital shopping.” That blend of empowerment, glamour, and eco‑integrity fits neatly into the live commerce frame, where immediacy depends on personality as much as product.
Consumers are responding to that mix. A report by Firework found that 82 percent of shoppers enjoy interacting with hosts in livestreams, while 71 percent say they trust those hosts more than static online reviews. Walmart’s livestream events, often anchored by celebrities, have driven up to six times more engagement than typical product videos, according to Popular Pays, and sales lifts of nearly 50 percent during the events themselves. The appetite for immediacy and interaction has changed expectations across categories — from electronics to cosmetics — and fashion’s adoption of the format was always a matter of time.
Luxury’s hesitation has centered on exclusivity. Jing Daily noted that some maisons worry livestreaming may dilute their mystique, especially if production feels rushed or sales tactics appear too obvious. Yet as online luxury sales are projected to reach 17.1 percent of the market this year, the idea that digital channels are incompatible with luxury has eroded. What matters now is how a house frames the experience: polished, narrative‑driven, and consistent with brand values.
McCartney’s answer is to stage her livestream not necessarily as a sales pitch but more as a story, one that folds Mendes into the brand’s narrative, punctuates tailoring with sustainable innovations, and invites fans into dialogue. “I wanted to show what we do here at Stella McCartney and everything we do here to be conscious and mindful of our impact on Mother Earth and our fellow creatures,” she said. That ethos, delivered in a format once dismissed as kitsch, lands differently when it comes with Savile Row cuts and mycelium snakeskin on screen.
Shop With Stella: Winter 2025 streams September 22 on stellamccartney.com, with a live Q&A following the show.
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