Would You Still Buy the Falabella?

One of the earliest memories I have of my mom at work – and I mean really at work, not educating me during spare hours at her medical school lab on the various human parts gawking at me from inside giant chemical jars (this is why I never went to medical school) – is seeing her write her research paper.

For what seemed like an unreasonably long stretch of time to an eight-year-old (but more likely was just a couple of months), she’d be hard at work in the field by day, and hunched at her chunky early-aughts desktop by night, pouring heart and soul into documenting the skin problems among workers employed in the various leather tanneries of Bangladesh. 

And once it went into print – under the National Institute of Preventive and Social Medicine, no less – it became one of the most extensive accounts of the unchecked health hazards of the chemical leather tanning industry. Not to mention, her absolute pride and joy. Or maybe joy isn’t quite the right word.

Yet, for years, I have been deeply mistrustful of anything but leather for my bags and, well, accessories in general. This, dear reader, was less on principle and more out of necessity – many a “vegan leather” receptacle has, after all, buckled – or peeled, or flaked, or cracked – under the weight of my belongings. And not always in socially acceptable surroundings.

Plus, that cheap PVC sheen is just plain ugly. 

And this is an opinion shared by many a fashion person, not just moi. An opinion that Stella McCartney has been fighting an uphill battle against since 2009. And with the Falabella, she might just be winning.

In Da Clerb, We All Vegan

“You know who I thought is quite good is the little McCartney girl. [Referring to Stella McCartney],” said French aristocrat, fashion designer, and style icon Jacqueline de Ribes in a 2000 interview with Dana Thomas, “If I was 25, I would like to wear her designs.” 

And really, nepo baby as she may be (Stella was born to ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife, photographer, vegetarian, and animal-rights activist Linda McCartney), she’s still got substance: her 1995 graduating collection at Central Saint Martins, for instance, was swiftly scooped up by everybody from Neiman Marcus to Browns, Joseph to Bergdorf Goodman.

Of course, it helped that, while peers sent nameless agency models down the runway clad in their collections, McCartney sent Naomi Campbell, Yasmin Le Bon, and Kate Moss – friends first, supermodels second, none of whom charged a fee. Her father wrote a song for the occasion, Stella May Day, because, well, he could. The front row was lined with Twiggy and Jude Law. 

It was a vibe, for sure, but a vibe that was also distinctly Stella’s own. 

For Spring/Summer 1999, McCartney, now the chief designer at Chloé, put forth an army of models in airbrushed souvenir t-shirts and low-slung jeans, just a sliver of mid-riff peeking underneath, set to the tune of President Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t have sexual relations” testimony. 

For the triptastic 2000 cover of Pop Magazine, a baby-faced McCartney posed alongside fellow Chloé creative, Phoebe Philo, as well as fellow Brit designers and it-girls extraordinaire, Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier, all clutching stripper poles (in a Vogue profile from July that year, Jonathan van Meter wrote, “She’s always slightly popping out of her camisole”).

It was this raucous partygirl spirit that McCartney eventually took to her own label in 2001. The only difference? Now, it was all vegan.

Betting on the Dark Horse

But even though McCartney had been experimenting with faux leather since her debut, “by 2005,” writes the Nod Mag, “industry rumours suggested that Kering, then a 50 per cent partner in her business, was close to losing patience with McCartney’s costly experiment in ethical luxury. They needed a cash cow – primarily a good bag that was, secondarily, ethically made.”

“The majority of luxury brands are driven by accessories,” McCartney told Business of Fashion, “that’s what pays their wages.” It was an ominous message: design a hit, or this experiment won’t continue.

So, what she delivered was one of fashion’s most daring and divisive styles yet. “Every year, the fashion industry kills over 1 billion animals for leather,” but her new bag, McCartney prided, “has never harmed a single creature, and is vegan down to the glue.”

Soft, slouchy, finished with a whipstitched chain (silver for starters, then swapped for lighter, infinitely recyclable aluminum, and later updated once again to recycled brass), and constructed from a fine, dyeable polyester suede called Shaggy Deer, it was the first of its kind to be positioned not as the “ethical” alternative to an It-bag, but as the It-bag itself. No asterisk, no apology, no “vegan-friendly option also available.”

And it was named after a tiny Argentine horse breed McCartney had adored growing up in the British countryside, with a sly nod to the cash cow of it all.

Here was the Falabella, and it was instantly scandalizing.

“I’ve never seen any claim from McCartney that the PVC she uses is some kind of special chemical blend that makes it more environmentally friendly or luxurious,” wrote Amanda, “and from what I can tell it’s just…PVC.” 

McCartney herself pushed back: “In 2008 we began to phase out PVC from our products and since 2010 all Stella McCartney products have been PVC free.” But critics remained unconvinced; vegan leather, they contended, would never last, never feel luxurious, never actually sell desire – only guilt. 

Now, seventeen years later, has much really changed?

Seventeen and Strong

“As someone who is exposed to the manufacturing side of handbags,” read a comment under Amanda’s post, “I can tell you that there is very little difference in the feeling of faux leather and real leather – not cheap faux, but high quality luxury faux materials.” 

And if my mom’s research was any indication, genuine leather is no less subject to a barrage of morally reprehensible chemicals than their faux counterparts, often with the added health hazards at stake for the tannery workers and terror and torment to the animals themselves.

Reddit user Chartreusepapoose attested, “I worked with a girl in the mid 2010s who had this bag and she beat it to absolute shit and it still looked good.” Eventually, Kim Kardashian jumped onto the Falabella bandwagon, as did Rihanna and fellow McCartney-friend, Kate Moss. Liana Satenstein wrote, “This bag would take me places. I could see myself walking about in the saddest pair of sweats and a stained t-shirt, still looking completely fabulous.”

Since then, the Falabella truly has gone places, reimagined in limited edition raffia, denim, and crystal-embellished designs, lined with an air-purifying Airlite coating that neutralizes 90% of air pollutants on contact, and remade again and again, each time more sustainable than the last, like VEGEA (made from grape by-products from Italian wineries), MIRUM^® (a plant-based, plastic-free, fossil fuel-free, water-free, and fully bio-degradable alternative leather), and YATAY^®, a blend of agricultural waste and recycled fibers.

And now with its latest campaign – “through Reneé’s voice, the story of the Falabella is told,” reads the official campaign copy – Gen-Z sensation Renée Rapp ushers in Gen F, Generation Falabella, a passing of the baton from popstar to popstar, “both a disruptor and icon… shaped by the past, worn in the present and carried into the future.” 

A future that skeptics still have a hard time believing. But perhaps, like everything else, it’s the thought that counts. As that commenter notes, “It’s time to start equating luxury with compassion, and Stella McCartney is doing a wonderful job at that.” And God knows we need more of that right now.