Out of the Hollywood Groove?
Chrissie, Kate and Madonna are just three of her famous friends. But that hasn’t saved her fashion label from sinking $10 million into the red. So what’s gone wrong with Stella McCartney, asks Charlie Porter.
If celebrity friends were the standard, Stella McCartney would be the most successful designer in the world. At the 31-year-old’s wedding to Alisdhair Willis in September, Kate Moss, Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin and Liv Tyler were among the 200-plus guests.
She is so close with Madonna that McCartney designed the dress for her wedding to Guy Ritchie. It says something about their lack of need for publicity that a photograph of the dress has never entered the public domain.
At the start of her career, her fame was purely down to her father, Paul McCartney, but recently she has grown beyond the Beatles link: in her own right, Stella is a buzz brand for the Heat generation.
But celebrity friends do not necessarily bring profits. It was reported on Monday that her Gucci Group-owned label, Stella McCartney Ltd, made a pre-tax loss of just under £4.5 million ($10.6 million) in the year to January. This is almost double the previous year’s deficit of £2.7 million. Sales of her clothes reached just £434,611 – not that great a figure when a McCartney dress can cost more than £1000.
Source: Smh.com.au