From its 2009 debut to Mirum, wine-grape leather, and celebrity-packed campaigns, Stella McCartney’s Falabella bag is the definitive story of how sustainable fashion became luxury fashion.
You probably recognize the chain even if you don’t know the name. That diamond-cut, linked hardware — cool to the touch, slightly oversized — is one of the most recognized signatures in fashion. It belongs to the Stella McCartney Falabella, a bag that has logged over a million units sold without ever once involving an animal hide. For 17 years, it has been making the case that the most coveted bag in the room doesn’t need leather to earn status.
Renée Rapp is the latest face of the campaign. Before her, the Falabella was carried — on runways, red carpets, and in the arms of editors — by Rihanna, Kate Moss, Kate Hudson, Kim Kardashian, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to name a few. That roster is the Falabella’s longest-running argument.
How the Falabella changed the conversation
The Falabella debuted in Stella McCartney’s Winter 2009 collection, arriving as something the luxury market had not encountered before: a designer handbag that eschewed leather. Its name honors the Falabella miniature horse, a breed that held particular significance for McCartney, who grew up in the British countryside with a lifelong love of horses — a passion shaped by her parents, rock icons Paul and Linda McCartney, who were leading voices in the early days of the vegetarian and animal rights movements.
The body used a polyester fiber called Shaggy Deer — fine, soft, and dyeable in any color, designed to mimic leather closely enough that it’s hard to tell the difference. The lining came from recycled polyester sourced from post-consumer plastic bottles. The hardware — that chain — was cast in recycled brass and recyclable aluminum, finished with a zero-waste metal medallion.
“Every year, the fashion industry kills over 1 billion animals for leather,” McCartney said. “The Falabella has never harmed a single creature, and is vegan down to the glue.”
What has kept the Falabella genuinely relevant across nearly two decades is McCartney’s sustained investment in its materials — each new iteration of the bag has introduced a different material innovation, treating the Falabella as a proof of concept for the broader industry. “I always ask, ‘Can we do this in a more sustainable way without sacrificing quality or design?’ If we can, then there is no reason not to,” McCartney said.
The Winter 2023 collection brought two significant debuts. The first was the use of Mirum, a plant-based, plastic-free material developed by Natural Fiber Welding that is composed of natural rubber, natural fibers, plant-based oils, and pigments, including biochar and rust. The carbon footprint comparison is hard to ignore: a square meter of Mirum generates between 0.8 and 2.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent from production to finished material. Cow-based leather generates 110 kilograms for the same area. The same season introduced Vegea, a material derived from wine-grape waste byproducts from Italian wineries, and AppleSkin, produced from the pulp left over from juice and jam production.
Winter 2024 saw two Falabella Tiny totes coated with Airlite, an air-purifying technology that uses semiconductor science to generate negative ions — neutralizing 90 percent of air pollutants and eliminating 99 percent of bacteria, molds, and viruses on contact. The coating itself is produced with 40 percent recycled materials in a factory running entirely on renewable energy, with a carbon footprint 62 to 76 percent lower than conventional alternatives. For Spring 2025, the brand added a new Falabella drawstring tote — same signature chain hardware, reconfigured as a shoulder strap, new silhouette.
The lineup has spanned from Mirum and Vegea, to AppleSkin, and Yatay — a material made from agricultural waste and recycled fibers — alongside styles in crinkled patent vegan leather, sequin fringe, crystal cage hardware, and metallic chain embroidery.
Becoming an icon
Celebrity visibility has been central to the Falabella’s story from the beginning, but the brand’s campaign choices have always reflected something more considered than pure star power. The 15th anniversary shoot in 2024 brought together Natalia Vodianova, Amber Valletta, and Cara Delevingne — three women who together represent different eras of the industry’s relationship with ethical fashion — alongside special-edition bags reimagined by artists including Urs Fischer, Gary Hume, and Hajime Sorayama, extending the Falabella into art-object territory without sacrificing wearability.
Last year’s Generation Falabella campaign, shot in Los Angeles by Inez and Vinoodh, moved toward younger cultural voices. It starred actor and animal rights advocate Odessa A’zion, actor and advocate Quen Blackwell, and musician Role Model, who uses his platform to address mental health. The trio modeled new embellished Falabella editions while dressed in Autumn 2025 ready-to-wear, embodying what the brand described as “the capsule’s spirit of friendship, energy and purpose.”
The 2026 campaign landed on Rapp, described by the brand as “a voice of her generation, bringing a modern perspective to an icon that transcends time.” Rapp has attended McCartney’s Paris runway shows regularly, making what the brand called “a natural progression” from friend of the house to campaign face. Across all of these choices — from Valletta’s sustainability credentials to A’zion’s advocacy work to Rapp’s generation-defining presence — the bag has always been as much about what its wearer stands for as what it’s carrying.
The bag functions as a vehicle for the brand’s larger mission — one that McCartney has articulated as “never compromising on desirability for sustainability.” It’s a weighty statement, especially when you trace the Falabella’s material arc from Shaggy Deer polyester to Mirum to Airlite-coated totes that actively clean the air around them. For McCartney, each step is a refusal to treat sustainability as a ceiling on ambition.
“The Falabella rebelled against the status quo,” the brand has said, “and set a new standard for luxury accessories made without any leather.” (Stella McCartney) Seventeen years and 1 million bags later, that rebellion is looking less like a gamble and more like a blueprint.
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