Sustainable mobility leader and renowned designer show parallels between the auto and fashion industries
Audi gained a strong partner in its vision of premium sustainable mobility with worldrenowned fashion designer Stella McCartney. Like Audi, McCartney is the industry leader in using innovative materials which minimize their impact to the environment. As such, she played a key role in the launch of the Audi e-tron GT and RS e-tron GT.
Both Audi and McCartney focus on forward-looking solutions. Among these is the use of sustainably-sourced materials, which can be found in the Audi e-tron GT and in McCartney’s innovative products.
An example is McCartney’s acclaimed Falabella Go bag that is made from Econyl. Derived exclusively from upcycled materials, Econyl is composed of excess nylon fibers and carpets. Other nylon materials even come from discarded fishing nets. For Audi, Econyl is also the material of choice for the e-tron GT’s carpet and floor mats.
Besides Econyl, other sustainable products incorporated in the Audi e-tron GT are a leather-free design package in which the car’s seats are covered with either a combination of artificial leather and Kaskade textile, or a blend of artificial leather and Dinamica micro-fiber. Kaskade and Dinamica are made mainly from polyester sourced from upcycled PET bottles, textiles or fiber surplus.
Audi’s embrace of innovative materials not only parallels McCartney’s own advocacy, but also forms the building-block of efforts in its mission to become a completely carbon-neutral company by 2050. In line with this, all new Audi models to be introduced globally starting 2026 will be fully electric, and the carmaker intends to stop producing vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2033.
For McCartney, her inclination toward a sustainable lifestyle was shaped early on. Her equally illustrious parents, The Beatles’ Sir Paul McCartney and the late Linda McCartney, an animal rights activist and photographer, “elected to view the world from a completely different perspective when it was entirely unfashionable to do so,” according to Stella McCartney herself.
So in the early 2000s when she embarked on her chosen career as a designer, McCartney was determined to hold onto those ethics even though sustainability was virtually an unknown concept within the industry back then. But she knew from the beginning that she could not make herself to create items like bags and shoes made of leather, as well as fur coats — doing so was simply against her belief system.
More than two decades on, McCartney remains unwavering in her values, and instead creates alternative solutions in the fashion industry. As such, she has reached the point where she could create sustainable luxury fashion items without compromise.
The same ethos applies with Audi, which has ushered in such mindset in the Philippines by introducing early this year the fully electric e-tron GT (together with the RS e-tron GT and e-tron SUV). As the brand accelerates its transition to fully electric mobility, it is also shaping the future through its definition of sustainability as the new luxury.
