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Stella McCartney scores a hit with Team GB uniforms

Published on Thursday August 09, 2012

D’Arcy Doran 

Special to the Star

LONDON—After Stella McCartney outfitted all 541 of Great Britain’s athletes for their Olympic events, dressing her Beatle dad to perform in the opening ceremony was easy.

In addition to the biggest medal haul in more than a century, Team GB’s other success is their uniforms, which reworked the Union Jack for the 21st century while raising the bar for Olympic style.

Reserved Britons are not traditionally flag wavers, but each time one of their athletes steps onto the podium, the uniform’s popularity seems to grow. Even the 40-year-old designer can’t help admiring them.

“I’m definitely looking at the outfits,” she told Sky News. “I’ve got to stop, actually.”

The collaboration with Adidas marks the first time a fashion designer has created national uniforms for athletes across all 26 Olympic sports. From fencing to field hockey, the goal was to make everyone feel part of one team.

“Stella McCartney has successfully created a unifying visual language that works across all the various kits, cleverly creating links between sports that could otherwise seem disparate,” said Alex Newson, the curator of London’s Design Museum current exhibition, “Designed to Win.”

McCartney’s Team GB uniform is showcased in the exhibit on innovation and design in sport. It tells how under her direction the design team developed 590 different items tailored to individual sports.

The project took three years and McCartney has said her team had to navigate what seemed like a million rules and regulations, from requirements that gymnasts’ uniforms look symmetricalto players being forbidden from wearing red in some sports.

The team also tailored each uniform to flatter the particular muscle groups used in different events.

What unifies them all is McCartney’s deconstruction of the Union Jack. Many countries use red, white and blue in their flags and uniforms,and to make British athletes stand out she decided to take the flag, “dismantle it, make it delicate, have more texture and then bring it together.”

Taking apart something so heavy with history was bound to create controversy. The Union Jack combines the flags of the United Kingdom’s three nations, and some critics have said the uniforms had too much Braveheart blue, from Scotland’s St. Andrew’s cross, and not enough English red from dragon-slayer St George’s cross.

“Putting myself up for this, I knew that I would be up for negative criticism. I’m not stupid. I get it,” she told Sky. “I just hope that I’ve done the nation proud, or as many (people) as I could, anyway.”

McCartney is used to criticism. In her 20s, when she was named Karl Lagerfeld’s successor as the designer for French fashion house Chloé, Lagerfeld reportedly sniped: “They should have taken a big name. They did, but in music, not in fashion.”

But just as her Chloé work won fans, Britons seem to be growing fonder of her uniforms with each podium appearance.

The outfits have “grown on me more as the Olympic fever’s built up,” said Ian Coxon, 45, a computer programmer from Nottingham, sporting one of McCartney’s shirts after watching track and field in the Olympic Stadium. “It’s certainly become more iconic as the Games have gone on.”

Sales are picking up, too. Perhaps the longest line in the Olympic Park is for the Team GB Megastore, where there is often a half-hour line to enter. Adidas CEO Herbert Hainer said Olympic merchandise sales have already topped $156 million, and demand is growing.

“The biggest sales are coming now,” Hainer told Reuters. “We can see people are queuing in stores now to get their products.”

At London luxury department store Harrods, Ian Thorley, a 41-year-old fashion publishing executive, was buying a Team GB replica shirt for the first time in his life.

Thorley, who lives in Spain, said that after years of being surrounded by Spanish soccer team jerseys and flags he was looking forward to going running in McCartney’s stylized Union Jack.

“It’s something that’s really hard to work with. It’s so iconic: a design that’s 400 years old. It’s difficult to change. So to take it forward is really good,” he said.

“I think she’s going to be designing for Team GB for a long time to come.”

Pedestrians walk past a window display at Harrods of London showing Great Britain Olympic Athletes sporting Team GB uniforms designed by Stella McCartney. (Aug. 8, 2012)