The timing is critical. Over the past decade, fashion has moved decisively away from fur, exotic skins and increasingly leather, pushed by regulatory pressure and shifting consumer sentiment. Feathers, however, have largely slipped through the cracks — until recently. Last season, animal welfare organisation Peta stormed London Fashion Week to protest the cruelty involved in harvesting feathers. “People don’t realise that [ostriches] have to be live plucked,” West notes. “They assume feathers are molted and collected off the ground. It’s a blind spot.”
The environmental costs amplify the urgency. Bird farming requires land, water and feed, while harvested feathers undergo sterilisation and chemical treatment. Yet, feathers remain commercially irresistible. “They’re fun, luxurious, decadent and they just look great,” Woollon says. “Brands tell me some of their bestsellers were feather covered, but have stopped producing them due to the ethical concerns. A credible alternative will be transformative.”
For Woollon, the partnership with Stella McCartney felt natural. “Stella has a wonderful record of working with textile innovators and is very public about vegan preferences,” she explains. “[Stella] also has the infrastructure to support young businesses like ours, and the network as well — so it just felt like an obvious connection.”
McCartney, a lifelong vegetarian, has built her brand on rejecting leather, fur, feathers and skins, pioneering luxury’s shift towards alternative materials. Her house has consistently led with firsts — from garments crafted in Mylo mycelium leather and Air Slides from recycled industrial waste, to Falabella bags made with recycled hardware, regenerative cotton collections, Mirum plant-based bags, Uppeal apple-waste alternatives and Sequinova plant-based sequins.
What began as a tentative inclusion of Fevvers in one or two looks for SS26 quickly grew to five. However, questions remain around the durability of this innovation. The material is too fragile to pass quality-control standards for mass-produced fashion. West and Woollon are focusing now on how to stabilise it for commercial use, while preserving its natural properties.
“We tried to buy a bit of time by convincing Stella to use it in the winter collection,” Woollon laughs. “But she said, ‘No, I love it so much I want to use it now.’ So here we are.”
“They are vegan, plant-based and natural,” West explains. “Because of that, each feather has a uniqueness, like a fingerprint. It hasn’t come out of a uniform manufacturing line. That natural irregularity gives it beauty.” This is where Fevvers positions its competitive edge. “Other imitations create the idea of a feather, but not the reality,” West says. “This material passes the second-glance test — you look at it and assume it’s real. That’s the distinction.”
From a London warehouse to a Paris runway
Fevvers was conceived when Woollon — trained in embroidery and with years of experience working with Indian textile house Chanakya International — encountered a plant with feather-like properties, which was being used in a visual installation for an event. It wasn’t initially planned as a feather replacement, but its “lightness, delicacy and sculptural qualities” suggested parallels, she says. “I was surprised to find out it wasn’t actually a real feather,” Woollon recalls. When applied with the same embroidery techniques used for ostrich feathers, it produced the same movement, softness and volume but without such intense ethical and environmental costs. (The co-founders decline to disclose the exact plant while it’s still in development.)