TAKE TWO

The third installment of our creative-swap project sees Stella McCartney and fledgling Chinese designer Shie Lyu repurposing and reinventing each other's work

- Laura Hawkins.

When Shanghai-and-Chengdu-based womenswear designer Shie Lyu received an email inviting her to take part in a Vogue-initiated collaborative project with Stella McCartney, her astonishment bordered on disbelief. “I thought the message was spam!” exclaims Lyu, who founded her label in 2020.

A short while later, in London, McCartney’s team opened the first mystery box shipped from Lyu’s Chengdu studio—which contained a fall 2022 floral-quilted cropped jacket and coordinating miniskirt, an abstract print top, gauzy black stockings, and chokers strung with romantic pearls and steel hardware. “There was a moment of pause where you think, Gosh, this has happened in such a different part of the world,” says McCartney. “I could see similarities in the dusty color palette and the tension between the masculine and feminine. I was also blown away by the love put into the look—the intricate stitchwork, the level of detail.” Take, for example, the impressionistic print, created using zoomed-in images of upcycled objects, like beads and paillettes, that had been chilled in Lyu’s freezer. “Shie cast a spell over our entire studio.”

Enchantment aside, when Lyu’s small team unpacked McCartney’s summer 2023 runway look—an oversized double-breasted suit in a Wall Street gray traceable-wool mix, layered with a seductive top made from draped recyclable brass chains—they were a bit intimidated by its precise sophistication. “We don’t really produce tailoring, so the look felt very challenging and out of our comfort zone,” Lyu recalls of the ensemble, which nodded to the golden halter necks and tank tops McCartney showcased on the Chloé spring 2000 catwalk when she was creative director of the Parisian maison.