Earth mother

For Stella McCartney, sustainability isn’t a buzzword, an aspiration, or an abstract concept. It’s a way of life—and a focal point of her ever expanding business.

- Hamish Bowles

“I’m so off my tits on coffee,” Stella McCartney admits, knocking back yet another cup in the foyer of a boutique hotel a stone’s throw from her home in London’s Notting Hill. “I had four school drop-offs this morning,” she explains. “I start at 6.30am, and by the time I get to work [by bicycle], I feel like I’m literally done for the day. I’m a big hot sweaty mess, too,” she adds, having decided that a thick organic-cotton flying suit (no pesticides used in its production) was the way to dress for a Monday morning that started grimly overcast but soon turned sultry. “It’s just so difficult being in fashion, isn’t it?” McCartney sighs. “We have to pretend to be so perfect. I’m the one that comes in with a punk-rock kind of ‘fuck this perfection,’ ” says the woman who famously turned up, with Liv Tyler, to the Costume Institute’s 1999 Rock Style exhibition, both wearing jeans and custom T-shirts spelling out ROCK ROYALTY. “It’s not maintainable, it’s not wise, and it’s very old-fashioned. So there you go.”

McCartney does the school run five days a week with daughters Bailey, 13, and Reiley, 9, and sons Miller, 14, and Beckett, 11. “When you’ve got a job and you’ve got kids,” she says, “it’s when you get to see them—you have to wake up super early and engage in that moment. Then I try and squeeze in some exercise and then I go to work. I try and get back for the bookending of being a mum.”

On weekends, McCartney spends more time with the family when they decamp to an estate in the wilds of unfashionable north Gloucestershire, the result of a house hunt born, as McCartney has explained, of “a desperate mission to find land so that I could ride my horse.”