A Stella Kinda Night! H&M Celebrated its Next Designer Collab With a Club Night
Stella McCartney and H&M took over a nightclub in Manhattan to celebrate their sophomore collaboration—21 years in the making. Janelle Monáe, Reneé Rapp, Amelia Gray, Lila Moss, and more were there to toast the new line.
Reported by Vogue.
Stella McCartney kept everyone waiting at her own party—which, let's be honest, is on brand. Two decades after she became the second designer to ever touch H&M (Karl Lagerfeld was first), she's back with a collection that feels less like a nostalgia grab and more like an architect returning to her own blueprint. "Reworking pieces from my archive brought back so much energy and joy," McCartney said, and the Chelsea loft where H&M threw the launch last week proved it.
The original 2004 collab became the stuff of retail legend: "McCartney Madness," "Stellamania," press calling it "a shopping riot." This time around, H&M wasn't taking chances on the hype. They flew in DJ Mark Ronson, Zuri Marley, and Daisy O'Dell. They got Dave to surprise-perform. They filled the room with it girls—Amelia Gray, Yasmin Wijnaldum, Lila Moss—in unreleased pieces while Joe's Pizza boxes circulated like we were at someone's actual apartment, not a major fashion event. Models eventually took the stage in disguise, blurring the line between catwalk and club in that very 2024 way of pretending fashion is still spontaneous.
The Sustainability Flex
McCartney used the moment to get serious: "Celebrating here in New York, surrounded by friends and collaborators, feels like a moment to reflect on how far we've come on sustainability in our industry—and to stay honest about how far we still have to go, together." The collection uses certified and recycled fibers, alternatives like industrial corn, the full environmental arsenal. It's McCartney being McCartney: you get the party, but you also get the lecture, and somehow both land.
Reneé Rapp, fronting the campaign alongside models Angelina Kendall and Adwoa Aboah, brought a different kind of energy. She showed up in a snakeskin bomber and gray belted trousers from the line, radiating the kind of genuine affection that rarely survives the campaign cycle. Her first designer purchase? Stella jeans—pink, splatter-painted balloon denim. She still owns them. "When I met her in person, she acted as if we had been friends for years," Rapp told Vogue. "And I always really appreciate that, especially in a work-y kind of setting because it immediately takes me out of myself." The two apparently FaceTime at inopportune hours across time zones, with McCartney bullying her into this whole thing in the most charming way possible.
The Stella McCartney x H&M collection drops May 7 in select stores and on hm.com—and yes, people will actually line up for it.
Read the original at Vogue.
