Stella McCartney Reveals First Bag Made From Banana Plants
The leading designer continues to embrace cutting-edge fabrics in her ongoing mission to create luxury clothing and accessories made with animal-free and sustainable materials.
Stella McCartney’s luxury new Stella Logo Fungi Forest Toile de Jouy Tote Bag, made with Bananatex. Credit: Stella McCartney
From championing faux fur to mushroom leather, Stella McCartney has been creating designer pieces that have helped push the fashion industry to become more sustainable and animal-friendly.
Now, the designer has launched her first item made with an innovative new fabric that’s made entirely from banana plants.
The Stella McCartney’s popular Logo tote bag has been reimagined for Autumn 2023 with a so-called ‘Bananatex’ base, which is the world’s first-ever durable fabric made purely from banana plants.
This pioneering material is vegan, 100 percent natural and plastic-free, and boasts impressive sustainable credentials - particularly when compared to carbon-intensive materials like cow leather or plastic.
The low-impact Bananatex is made from Abacá banana plants, a self-sufficient plant which requires no pesticides or fertilizers to grow. The brand works with local farmers in the Philippines who cultivate the plants in a natural ecosystem without chemical treatments.
Harvested banana plants. Credit: Stella McCartney
Once harvested, the stalks of the banana plants can be made into a luxurious, high-quality cotton-like canvas. That fabric has been used as the base of Stella McCartney’s luxury new Stella Logo Fungi Forest Toile de Jouy Tote Bag, which is finished with recycled and recyclable materials, and represents the latest in material innovation for the brand.
Over Two Decades of Pioneering Ethical Fashion
McCartney launched her luxury lifestyle brand in her name in 2001, after four years as creative director of Chloé. The designer is a passionate animal advocate, inspired by her late mother, Linda McCartney, and has never used any animal-derived fur, leather, or skins in her collections, instead championing sustainable, innovative materials.
More and more consumers are choosing sustainable fashion that is animal-free, due to heightened awareness surrounding the climate crisis and animal exploitation. More than 70 percent of Americans are now against fur farming, leading to an increased number of fashion houses, including Gucci, Prada, and Dolce & Gabbana, dropping fur from their collections.
Alongside promoting ethical fur alternatives, McCartney has long called for an end to the fur trade. In 2021, she joined seven other designers, including Vivienne Westwood, Katharine Hamnett, and Helen Moore, and the luxury fashion department store Selfridges in urging the UK to become the first country in the world to ban the sale of real fur. In a letter addressed to the then-UK Prime Minister, the activists highlighted their “shared belief that fashion, driven by consumers and enabled by innovation, is evolving to make animal fur obsolete.”
The brand’s first garments using mushroom-leather, a black bustier and utility pants set. Credit: Stella McCartney
Also that year, Stella McCartney launched the world’s first-ever garments made from vegan, lab-grown Mylo mushroom leather, as part of a groundbreaking consortium between Mylo, Stella McCartney, Adidas, Lululemon, and Kerin. The consortium helped to push mushroom leather into the mainstream and promote sustainable alternatives to animal leather.
Designed to be low impact, mushroom leather emits far fewer greenhouse gasses and uses less water and resources than animal leather, leading experts to believe that it can help designers in their quest to become more planet-friendly. It may also help to spare the one billion animals slaughtered for the leather industry each year.
McCartney also recently entered the beauty world with the launch of her line of sustainable skincare, called STELLA. Developed in partnership with LVMH's Beauty Division, the three-product range is vegan, cruelty-free, and based on Stella’s personal philosophy of using ‘only what you need’.
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The footage was reportedly recorded at Marshall BioResources in North Rose, New York, where up to 22,000 dogs - mostly beagles - are being bred for animal experimentation.