Stella McCartney wants to save the ocean. So why does her fashion show look like this?

Words: Levi Kaye, edited by Charlotte Lewis

Stella McCartney's Spring/Summer 2027 show arrived with an environmental message: “sea life, not seafood.” There were dolphins, sharks, waves, ocean imagery, even a David Attenborough voiceover! Along with a collection free of wool.

(Image courtesy of Vogue Runway)

An incredibly strong message that, on paper, sounds exactly like what sustainable fashion should be doing. But I can't stop thinking about the setting, and how completely wrong it is. Because this is Paris Fashion Week, an international event built around flying people into one city, creating enormous spectacles, generating thousands of pieces of content, convincing people they need something new, making a mess, and leaving. 

The uncomfortable question Fashion Week needs to ask itself is: how sustainable can it actually be when the spectacle itself is part of the problem?

Let's be super clear here: Stella McCartney has been talking about sustainability for YEARS at this point. Sustainability is a fickle thing in fashion; it can be done a million different ways - brands choose to champion better production methods, circularity, repair services, resale, long-lasting design, or simply just making less in the first place. McCartney's sustainability practices come from textile and material choices.

Using recycled materials & no animal products on sight, her Spring/Summer 2027 collection was built around a genuine environmental campaign against the damage caused by industrial fishing. As she greeted guests backstage in Paris, McCartney spoke of her collection:

“The fishing industry is stealth; it's war; we're at war with the ocean, we're at war with the creatures that live in there.”

I'm not questioning whether she cares about these issues; I'm questioning the format she’s using to communicate them. Because the environmental message shouldn't play second fiddle to the fashion show; in this case, the environmental message IS the show. With garments featuring dolphin prints, wavy silhouettes and an oceanic colour palette, suddenly McCartney's environmentalism has become something beautiful and glamorous, turning this idea of saving the ocean into a desirable image. 

(Image courtesy of Vogue Runway)

The problem, though, that many brands face is that sustainability isn't really an image; it's a systematic problem. 

It's a Fashion Week Problem, because Fashion Week has a newness problem.

The contradiction gets a lot harder to ignore when it comes to Paris Fashion Week and Sustainability. Sustainability asks us to consume differently. To buy less, to buy better, to keep things for longer. 

Fashion week, on the other hand, exists to show us what's next. With new collections, new silhouettes, and the next thing we are supposed to want. 

None of that necessarily makes Stella McCartney's message less important. If anything, it makes the choice of platform even more interesting. Because she is asking her consumers to think about the environmental consequences of what we consume, while communicating that message through one of fashion's biggest celebrations of consumption. And maybe that's why the show looks the way it does. The dolphins. The waves. The oceanic colours. The Attenborough voiceover. The celebrities. The spectacle. It's all designed to make us look.

Stella McCartney isn't necessarily the problem here. The problem is that Fashion Week might be a terrible place to ask us to consume less. So, Stella McCartney wants to save the ocean. But can she do it from Paris Fashion Week?