English fashion designer, Stella McCartney is known to stay inside the box when it comes to her fashion, however, her latest campaign where she has literally chucked her models in the garbage has caught some attention.
Stella McCartney has completed the entirety of her newest campaign on a landfill site. Those precious and expensive garments are being worn only to be rolled around in rubbish and never to smell the same again. A tragedy, really. Yet McCartney says that there was a deeper message behind it all.
“The idea we had with this campaign is to portray who we want to be and how we carry ourselves; our attitude and collective path,” McCartney said in a release. “Our man-made constructed environments are disconnected and unaware of other life and the planet which is why there is waste.”
The campaign was shot by photographer Harley Weir in collaboration with artist Urs Fischer who described McCartney’s vision as being “about dignity, love and a beautiful attitude to all challenges, all while feeling good and looking great.”
McCartney has always been very passionate about environmental issues with 53 percent of the label’s materials coming from sustainable sources and is also proudly vegetarian. As a result, the campaign initially feels like a genuine attempt at spreading a message about finding the love in an environmentally destructive, highly pollutive industry in fashion.
But what is the end goal? Yes, McCartney is drawing attention to the way consumer culture and in particular, single use items and the constant demand for new fashion and trends create unsustainable levels of wastefulness and environmental damage but how does she reconcile this with her own role in the fashion industry. What are her designs and clothing specifically doing to combat these issues? That isn’t clear from immediately looking at this campaign and perhaps Stella and Co. need to think a bit more about their message beyond finding love in a wasteland to be seen as actual proponents of sustainable and ethical fashion rather than using it as a prop to continue to fuel consumer culture.
For more on Stella McCartney’s latest campaign, see the website, here.