Veuve Clicquot x Stella McCartney: a champagne gift case cut from grape-stem leather

The idea started as a challenge inside LVMH. Stella McCartney, the group's sustainability adviser, had been making bags from grape-skin waste of Italian wineries and told Bernard Arnault: give me one of your brands and let me use its waste. The brand she was handed was Veuve Clicquot, whose Champagne harvests leave behind the grape stems she would turn into leather.

Working with the house, McCartney turned those manually collected stems — sourced with full traceability from the Grand Cru Bouzy vineyard Madame Clicquot purchased two centuries ago — into a grape-based alternative leather created in less than 18 months. She cut three Frayme bags from it, plus a bottle holder carrying Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, and added two Elyse sandals whose platform wedges use recycled cork from the Reims cellars. The pieces went down her Spring 2024 runway at Paris Fashion Week, with the full collection landing in shops in March 2024.

Designers argued the material looked, felt and lasted like real leather while addressing two emissions sources at once: leather production and winemaking. At Pentawards 2025, the identity system built around it took the Platinum Award in Brand Identity & Connected Packaging, with the jury praising a next-generation material as a brand statement as much as an aesthetic one. The collaboration became a reference for how a drinks giant can turn its own agricultural by-product into the packaging's most tactile signature.