Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney runs a luxury fashion house that does not use leather or fur. A lifelong vegetarian like her mother Linda, she works with synthetics and more sustainable fabrics instead. When Tom Ford left Gucci, she was approached to replace him and turned it down because of the leather.

The daughter of Paul McCartney made her first jacket at 13. As a teenager she interned with Christian Lacroix, then learned tailoring from Edward Sexton, her father’s Savile Row tailor. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1995, and Naomi Campbell, Yasmin Le Bon and Kate Moss modelled her final collection for free.

The turning point came in 1997, when Chloé in Paris named her creative director in place of Karl Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld remarked that her name was famous only in music. The doubts did not last. In 2001 she launched her own label in a joint venture with the Gucci Group, with a first shop at the Palais-Royal in Paris.

To read her clothes, look for the mix she likes: sharp tailoring on one side, sportswear on the other. She has designed a line with Adidas since 2004, and in 2012 she dressed Team GB for the London Olympics and Paralympics, the first time a leading fashion designer did this for a whole national team. In 2025 she bought back LVMH’s stake and became sole owner of her house again.