McCartney has used fashion to build herself an environment – a wardrobe, in fact – that incorporates all of this: her background, her beliefs, the worlds of work and of being a mum, her London and country lifestyles. Today she is wearing an electric-blue sweatshirt with an embossed pattern over a silk shirt in deep french navy, with faded slouchy jeans and heels, all from her label. “I’m a head to toe-er. I don’t wear anything else. I wear my own lingerie, I wear Stella For Adidas socks. Some pieces are new and some are old – these jeans I’ve had for about five years, the shoes are brand new. But it’s all my stuff.” The only non-McCartney pieces she wears are the odd vintage piece from Linda, her late mother (“but not so much these days”) and wellies by Hunter, where Willis is creative director.
McCartney’s is a privileged life, but like that of any working mum it gets gritty at a granular level. She’s in New York to present her pre-fall collection; after our lunch, we will head uptown to the Park Avenue mansion where models will play hopscotch and throw shapes in miniature electric cars, and guests will include Patti Smith, Jerry Seinfeld, Liv Tyler and Susan Sarandon. But, discussing schedules, we discover we are both on the red-eye home to London, heading directly to the airport after the event. “Well, that’s because we’ve got kids,” she says. “But you just know, don’t you, that if we were men with children, we would fly home tomorrow. Why is it that as a mum, you don’t get to go back to your hotel and sleep?”
As a lunch companion, she has a standard level of food neuroses for a woman of our age. She demands that her male PR order a side of chips. But, he says, I don’t want fries. Yes, but we want some, McCartney says. “We’ve got to have something exciting on the table, right?” she appeals to me. (She has two, maybe three, chips.) She is slim with a honed body and looks young for 42, not in a Botoxed way, but because there’s something eternally childlike about that freckled, foxy colouring, and because money itself smooths years off the face.
The orthodoxy of the day around how to be a good mother while working hard is a spiel about being in the moment: when I’m at work I’m committed to work; when I’m with my kids I give them 100%. But McCartney, typically, questions this simplistic mantra. “It’s not really like that, is it? Because you’re reading the bedtime story and suddenly you remember a call you didn’t make. And when I’m dropping my kids at school I’m noticing what people are wearing. The idea that you can have no life outside of that one moment doesn’t make sense to me. When I had Miller, he came three weeks early, just before my fashion show. So the DJ was practically the first person to meet him, in the hospital room, talking about show music.” We discuss how, recently, high-profile examples have led to it becoming acceptable for female designers to take maternity leave. “It’s brilliant. I’m a bit annoyed I missed out. But really, I wouldn’t change a thing. My kids are great. Just great.”