Olympic Gold: Stella McCartney Unveils Her Adidas Designs for Team GB

Olympic Gold: Stella McCartney Unveils Her Adidas Designs for Team GB

We must be frank: What with half of Central London’s roads and tube stations being dug up in preparation, citizens’ collective feeling about hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics might thus far be expressed as a long-suffering sigh of resignation. Today, though, British Olympic excitement has finally been roused by Stella McCartney’s unveiling of her Adidas designs for the British team’s uniforms at the Tower of London: the great reveal of what Team GB will wear as it competes across 46 sports. “I’ve been talking to athletes for two years,” she said. “I wanted to ask what matters to them—whether it might psychologically improve their performance to look good, what I needed to do to work around the rules and regulations of each discipline, and all their technical requirements. Some told me, yeah, if I look better it helps. Others said, I don’t care how I look as long as I can shave off a second. Working with them mad  even more impressed with how dedicated they are—and so proud to be British!”

As far as the Olympic Games’ relationship with fashion goes, McCartney is setting her own world record: This is the first time a world-renowned fashion designer has ever been entrusted with the responsibility of bringing together the look of a summer Olympic squad. “I thought it would be great if the design could make everyone feel like one team. I started with the Union flag, which I love—but it’s been so overused, and I didn’t want to do it in the teapot-and-pillow sort of way! So I isolated parts of the design and used it as a graphic.” True to McCartney’s eco beliefs, at least part of the huge range of hyper-specialist state-of-the-art sportswear is made from recycled synthetics. “See! Half a million plastic bottles have gone into all this!” she chirped, waggling a tiny tennis skirt with a built-in pair of shorts.

It’s McCartney’s eight-year training, in the form of working on her Adidas by Stella McCartney collection, that qualifies her as creative director of this intensive project, of course. (A manager from the technical department of the company was going around describing it as “a love triangle between the athletes, Stella, and us.”) On parade with McCartney, all the British sportswomen—including the national heroine heptathlete Jessica Ennis, gymnast Becky Downie, sprinter Jeanette Kwakye, and beach volleyballer Zara Dampney—all looked extremely pleased at this chance to show off the fashionable results for their own fields. There’s one “look” they’ll all be competing hardest to wear, though. That’s the British Olympic “presentation suit”—the two-piece sweatsuit winning athletes traditionally don to mount the podium and accept the gold, silver, or bronze. This year, British female Olympians in London won’t be stepping up in any sloppy, blocky old tracksuit. Thanks to Stella, they’ll be standing there kissing their medals in ultra-fashion-worthy 2012 style: a jacket, tied with a ribbon-belt to create a peplum, over a pair of skinny navy trackpants implanted with a red tuxedo-stripe zipper on the outside leg. Go, girls.