Money doesn't mean much to me. You can't buy good times, and you

THE day Madonna visited Stella McCartney's studio for a new dress, the designer reminded her that there was no discount for being famous.

"I made her pay through the nose for it," says the daughter of Sir Paul McCartney. "I had to finance my next collection, thank you very much."

How did Madonna react?

"Then she was a client, now we're great friends."

That first meeting took place four years ago, when Stella was selling her own-name range from her flat in West London.

She has come a long way since then. As resident designer at Chloe, she has turned the French house around and is a major force in the fashion world.

Stella is taller (5ft 7ish), thinner (size 10ish) and prettier than in her pictures. She perches cross-legged in a vintage lily-of- the-valley-print 40s chiffon tea-dress, with a sexy little pink silk slip visible underneath. Her feet and hands are tiny.

She'd be the picture of elegance but for her slightly scuffed heels ("I was dancing all last night"), the scraped-back hair ("I haven't washed it for three days") and make-up - raunchy eyeliner, smudgy red lipstick and gnarled black nail varnish.

Despite invitations to every flashy event imaginable, most weekends are spent "Eurostarring it" back to the family home in Sussex from her base in Paris. "Riding my horse, Blanket, is probably what I enjoy doing most in my life," says Stella.

"Normal things are important to me. I don't party much. I'd much rather be at home enjoying a good glass of wine with a close friend.

"And most of my friends are normal people - it's only pictures of me with someone famous that seem to get in the papers. I can't really believe all that fame."

When she does appear in the papers, it is usually with her A-list celebrity friends such as Liv Tyler, Patsy Kensit, Liz Hurley, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss - all champions of her designs.

More recently Stella has been spotted at several art events. "I love art. I would love to know more about architectural art," she says. "When I was at college I used to 'hang' with the sculpture boys, partly because they were heterosexual - and cute - but also because we could talk about art.

"Money doesn't mean much to me. It doesn't make you a more interesting or a better person. You can only have so much, then what do you do? Give it to your kids and hope it will make them happier?

"I'm not a huge spender of money, probably because I was brought up to not throw it around. Spending it doesn't make me particularly happy. You can't buy good times. You can't buy good company. I rarely shop."

Stella moved to Paris three years ago when she secured the top designing job at Chloe at 24. Six shows later, she has not only stuck to her principles but also increased sales by 500 per cent and reinvented "the Chloe look" which is now as commercially successful as Gucci, Versace, Dior and Prada.

She has homes in the prestigious 8th arrondissement of Paris and in Notting Hill, a flat which she bought with her own money. But it hasn't been an easy ride.

Her mother Linda's death from breast cancer in 1998 was devastating. "I'm still coping with it on a day-to-day basis. Not a day goes by without my thinking of her. Her positive attitude is my legacy.

"I try to be strong because she was. When something bad happens I try to think, what would Mum have said? She used to say, 'Don't let the turkeys get you down'. That still makes me smile."

Stella McCartney was 13 when she designed her first jacket. "It was dark blue, made in fake suede with a pale-pink lining; very 80s with lots of buckles and a big, baggy collar. I guess I knew then that was what I wanted to do." After completing a foundation course at Ravensbourne College, Kent, she was accepted by one of the leading fashion courses in the country, Central St Martins.

"Did I enjoy St Martins? Mmmm. It was weird to be finally doing fashion design for the first time, but I consciously distanced myself from 'fashion types' - they were a bit scary.

BEFORE the degree show some students would hide their designs under pattern- cutting paper when other students walked by. I just felt, 'Whoa, get real'."

Stella's course director Wendy Dagworthy remembers her as a very motivated student. "She was very down to earth. You would never have guessed who her father was."

That is until Stella's degree show in 1995 when the audience was kept waiting an hour for her parents. And Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell wore her designs.

"What's wrong with inviting my parents to my degree show?" she mutters. "Isn't that what every other student does?" Post- graduation, she was encouraged to set up her own label and using a small loan from her parents, Stella sold her line from her basement flat.

"I didn't know anything. I'd scoured flea markets for one-off Victorian glass buttons, vintage lace and fabric for my degree collection.

"When I began taking orders from my original samples I thought, where do I go to get 50 metres of fabric dyed? Where can I find buttons like this again?

"Everything had been a one-off and I had given the antique lace dresses away to my best friends - they'd be worth a fortune now. I just hadn't envisaged how difficult or expensive putting out a range could be.

"I was juggling everything, doing everything the wrong way round. I couldn't sleep at night for worrying."

Around this time the then president of Chloe, Mounir Moufarrige, began looking for a new designer.

The fashion house had sunk dangerously into a mid-life crisis. Moufarrige wanted a young designer who could understand and seduce younger clients, in keeping with the original spirit of Chloe.

It is said that more than 41 candidates were up for the job, but the search was halted as soon as Chloe's scouts stumbled across Stella's delicate glass buttons, vintage lace, modern tailoring and growing A-list of clients.

"I don't think the number was ever as high as 41. I only know that when they saw my work they stopped looking at anyone else's," says Stella .

"That's what makes me so mad when other people say I only got the job because of my name or for having a famous dad. I was beginning to gain recognition for designing a particular style of clothes in London. This is why the Chloe scouts came to see me. They liked my style. They liked my designs.

"Who on Earth would buy clothes just because the designer was the daughter of a Beatle. I mean who?

"I'm the third child. Third children have a little something extra to prove," she says, nibbling one of those black fingernails.

Moufarrige's gamble on a designer with less than 18 months' work experience paid off. Her first Chloe collection proved the hottest ticket of the season. The verdict since is that she has genuine talent.

"I'm not in this industry simply to make pretty frocks," she says. "If there was nothing challenging about being a fashion designer, I honestly wouldn't do it. I like to explore the mechanics of the sexes through my work. I find the idea of a woman wearing a Savile Row tailored man's suit, incredibly sexy. A man will find it a turn-on because he can relate to it.

THIS is a very strange era for women. Women are powerful and this affects men and our relationships with them. We don't want to be pushed around, but we want to be powerful in our femininity. My style is sexy clothes without aggression.

"I get a buzz from women telling me they've just bought one of my suits and how feminine they feel in it. I like spotting my designs on people too, that's pretty cool. When Britney Spears wore the grey trouser suit, she went up in my estimation. She looked great. Go Britney!"

Stella has also made her mark on the High Street, which rips off her designs mercilessly - her sunglasses encrusted with diamonds, her Stetsons, cowboy boots, and customised and ripped slogan T-shirts.

As a child Stella was a popular, playful girl with long red hair and freckles and "a bit of a show-off".

She says: "I wasn't the cool kid in my class. I was the funny one. I was always meeting people from different backgrounds because we travelled a lot, but as a child I didn't differentiate between who was famous or important. One minute I'd be talking to a Scottish blacksmith, the next it would be Michael Jackson.

"As a kid I'd walk into a room with Dad and clock the entire room clocking him. I was hyper-aware of people three miles off mouthing, 'There's Paul McCartney'.

"The only times I felt animosity from other children was in times of the usual adolescent turmoil and when Dad got busted for drugs and put in jail. That wasn't easy."

Despite having tea with Stevie Wonder and going on tour with Wings, she says: "My upbringing was normal, and as a result I feel I am definitely normal.

"The highlight of my life was going to school discos. I remember one when I was 11. I wore a pink and grey dotted ra-ra skirt, a little top and some pink legwarmers - which I must do again.

"No one ever picked on me because of who my parents were. It was more like kids making fun of kids for silly reasons. I grew up believing anyone could achieve anything. I also believed everyone had the same opportunities in life. One side of me still thinks, Dad grew up in a council flat in Liverpool and look what he achieved. The other thinks that's total shit.

"If I can get any comfort from my mother not being with me it's knowing what she accomplished She was an incredibly ballsy woman to stick up for animal rights. I believe she changed the way that thousands of people think. Sadly, it was only on the day she died that anyone seemed to acknowledge it.

"She was always being made fun of and ridiculed. Maybe it's human nature. You give up smoking and then see someone smoke and think, how ridiculous.

"But until you stop, you never see it that way. I can't understand why people eat real burgers with eyeballs and heaven knows what in, and not a veggie-burger."

Stella is about to become a patron of the Vegetarian Society, a position her mother held and her father still holds. "In a year, fur won't be fashionable," she says, "but it will come back again. That's the embarrassing thing about what I do for a living. The fickleness."

So what next? Stella has renewed her contract with Chloe but prefers to keep the details a secret. She doesn't deny being courted by several other fashion houses, including Tom Ford at Gucci. '

"Tom's a gorgeous guy, but you shouldn't believe everything you read. I've apparently been meeting him for secret trysts in motel rooms. I don't think so.

"Who knows what will happen? If I became pregnant, maybe I'd want to start up a maternity line - now that would be interesting."

Copyright 2000 MGN LTD
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