FOLLOWING in a famous father's footsteps has never been easy, but to the generation spawned by the pop icons of the 1960s, it has proved practically impossible. A prurient and omnipresent tabloid press made every slip on the pathway to adulthood headline news. The price of parental fame was high - drug addiction, lonely suicides - for sad dysfunctional non-achievers with no self-esteem. None of this can be said of Stella McCartney, who has just been appointed chief designer to the House of Chloe at the age of only 25.
In the index of celebrity tittle-tattle, the McCartney name has long been noticeable for its absence. Not just Macca himself, but the whole brood. From the outset he determined that home life would be as ordinary as possible. No photographs, no interviews. Pop peers thought he was mad to send his kids to an ordinary primary school in north London, but he did. When the growing family moved to a farm in East Sussex (where he even brews his own beer), it was the quality of the local schools that was the deciding factor.
Although Paul McCartney is about as rich as you get, there would be no boarding school elitism, just the local (admittedly rural) comprehensive.
Stella McCartney is Linda and Paul's eldest child (Linda has a daughter by a former marriage) and the news of the Chloe appointment could be seen as proof that the McCartneys' below-the-parapet defence of their offsprings' childhood has worked: success in a field completely removed from that of her parents. Yet carping voices both in the industry and the media are already being raised.
One commentator described Stella as "modest, and modestly talented". Wendy Dagworthy, designer and Ms McCartney's former tutor at St Martin's College of Art and Design, that vies with the Royal College of Art as fashion's premier nursery, remembered her as "a very hard working girl, but I would say that she did not really stand out in her year".
So what's new? Do we really believe fashion is different from any other field of high-octane marketing? From film stars to novelists, talent is an optional extra in the package that sells.
Couture houses are in the doldrums. Client lists are dwindling. The razzmatazz over the Paris collections is not about selling the confections on the catwalk - it's about selling the things that make the money, the stockings, the perfume, the sunglasses. The name.
However unfair it may appear to the also-rans, in choosing Stella McCartney, Chloe - or rather Vendome, the group that owns the fading Paris ready-to-wear house - was guaranteed global publicity that money literally could not buy.
And Vendome knows the value of a blue chip name: it has several already - Dunhill, Piaget, Mont Blanc. Alexander McQueen's appointment to succeed Galliano at Givenchy, while Galliano himself took up the reins at Dior, was just as calculated: the appointments were in-house musical chairs. Both couture houses are owned by the rival luxury group that also has Moet Chandon and Louis Vuitton within its portfolio.
All parents want is their child to be happy, and that means enjoying what they do. Clearly what Stella McCartney wants to do is design clothes. Although much has been made of the fact that she graduated less then two years ago, she hasn't just winged it. As her tutor acknowledged, she is hardworking.
Her apprenticeship began nine years ago, with work placements at Christian Lacroix (she worked on his first couture collection), Betty Jackson and Savile Row, where she learnt rigorous tailoring skills. She left school at 15, determined to pursue her career in her own way. Until her graduation show, a full 10 years after she left school, nobody had heard of her. Then suddenly Stella McCartney was headline news. Not because of her clothes, not because her famous parents were sitting in the audience, but because the models who strutted her designs were women who command $10,000 a day on the Paris catwalks: Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Yasmin Le Bon. Her "friends".
Let it not be forgotten, Stella McCartney has two parents, two role models. The Eastman name and fortune did no harm to Linda's pre- and post-Paul photographic career; neither did the McCartney name when it came to frozen vegetarian food. Not that Linda can't hold a camera or chop a carrot. She obviously can, just as her daughter can cut, drape and stitch. But both mother and daughter know that in the battlefield of the 20th century market place, you use every weapon in your arsenal, including celebrity, including hype, as demonstrated by Chloe's president, Mounir Mouffaridge, in defending the designer he chose from 41 contenders. "She has a huge talent and we are in the business of talent." Or as it used to be called, the business of making money. As any child of a famous parent will tell you, there may be no escape from living with the name, but if you can make your own money and make the name your own, you'll be okay.