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HER clothes are aspired to by thousands
of fashion victims but afforded by only a very few.
Now, however, almost anyone will be able to boast a Stella
McCartney label in their wardrobe as she becomes the latest
designer to sign up with the high-street fashion chain
H&M.
Announcing that she was to design a 40-piece range for
the chain, McCartney said yesterday: “It means a new way
of presenting my clothes to a larger audience.”
The line, Stella McCartney for H&M,
which will launch in November, follows the chain’s hugely
successful collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld last year.
H&M is no doubt hoping to emulate
Lagerfeld’s success. On the day that his collection launched,
it was sold out by lunchtime in London, Paris and New
York.
McCartney too can only benefit from the
mass awareness the project will create. She is currently
on a three-year deadline from Gucci, her label’s parent
company, to produce a profit.
Margareta van den Bosch, H&M’s head
of design, said: “We are thrilled to collaborate with
Stella. Her designs are modern and cool but classic and
wearable. We have long admired her sense of tailoring
and femininity.”
According to Ms van den Bosch, extensive
conversations with customers suggested that McCartney
would be a wise choice. The pricetags on the line will
probably be around a tenth of those on McCartney’s own
collection.
H&M, a Swedish company with 1,000
stores in 21 countries, is popularly referred to within
the industry as the Ikea of fashion. It is known for its
gutsy optimism — last month it produced a fashion show
in Central Park that lasted for five hours. It has been
a Titan of the high street here since its first British
store opened in 1976.
When the rejuvenating influence of the
catwalks hit the high street in the late Nineties, H&M
caught on and upped its game. Now, like Topshop and Zara,
it is known as a good source of high fashion-influenced
clothes at low prices.
In another partnership on a smaller scale,
the store has also joined forces with the Seventies designer
Elio Fiorucci, who has created a swimwear collection that
will launch next month.
The company is no doubt hoping that its
relationship with McCartney will be happier than that
with Lagerfeld. Although his blockbuster collection launched
last November pushed H&M’s fourth-quarter profits
up by 23.9 per cent, the ending was not so happy: Lagerfeld
was soon found sniping that he had designed for “slim,
slender people” and H&M had extended that to bigger
sizes.
McCartney took over from Lagerfeld at
Chloe in 1997 before launching her own label in 2001;
in February she gave birth to Miller, her son by her husband
Alisdhair Willis.
For Lagerfeld, the H&M venture was
done for fun as much as for business. He was the perfect
choice for his longstanding obsession with fashion’s extremes
and with combining the costly with the cheap. As he told
me in Paris at the time: “This is the state of fashion
now. What matters is clothes that are perfect for the
moment, regardless of price. Being expensive is not important.”
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