What is next for collaborations?
The following article was written by Ana Andjelic, founder of The Sociology of Business. The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Highsnobiety as a whole.
Last week, H&M celebrated 20 years of its designer collaborations. Since then, one would be hard-pressed to find a consumer-facing brand that didn’t try the model, in the name of creativity, market expansion, revival, or attention-grabbing.
The model itself has evolved from attention management to world-building, with brands using it to build their full-stack experiences. As a marketing strategy, it makes sense: it capitalizes on experiential spending, diversifies revenue streams, provides value innovation, enforces brand differentiation through taste and aesthetics, creates immersive settings (it’s a short line from the Museum of Ice Cream to the Coach Coffee Shop), and showcases a brand’s quality/provenance/artistry.
This fusion-as-a-strategy is aligned with big brands’ ambitions to be cultural players (LVMH) and to “create identity that transcends what we sell” (Prada). The ultimate branding is of our time and how we pass it, so brands use collaborations to curate what we eat, how we travel, the art and culture we have access to, the entertainment we enjoy, in addition to what we wear.
The operative word here is curation. Through it, brands articulate their taste and set themselves up as taste arbiters. Taste assumes a level of abstraction - or universality - that can be applied far beyond a brand’s original market. It’s a filter, not an output.
On the most literal level, we have seen Simon Porte Jacquemus, J.W. Anderson and Grace Wales Bonner curating exhibitions (at Hepworth Wakefield, MoMA and Christie’s, respectively) and Moncler working with a range of creators from different categories, from musicians to actors to luggage makers and car companies.
Original creations go beyond, like the interdisciplinary installation “I Smell You on My Clothes” by Helmut Lang and Jenny Holzer presented at the 1996 Florence Biennale, which a few years later paved the way for Lang’s perfume launch (again, in collaboration with Holzer). More recently, Prada collaborated with photographers Drew Vickers and Keizō Kitajima on the Flowers Resort campaign. Sheets of paper with their photographs were given to flower shops across the world as bouquet wrapping paper. In 2022, Miu Miu collaborated with experimental photographer Lucas Blalock on a series of still life photographs made out of Miu Miu accessories.
A brand taste is also a common thread - a throughline - connecting different areas of culture into a recognizable brand narrative. There’s more than one way to tell a story, and world-building is about interstitial storytelling, with one area of culture (e.g. food or art) conveys a piece of emotional puzzle compatible, but different, to others. Emily Oberg, the founder of fashion brand Sporty & Rich, worked with Le Bristol Paris on a collection that “spoke to the hotel’s history,” where “the decor, staff and service each embody the true essence of luxury, and to us, the very meaning of Sporty&Rich.” Cross-category collaborations are world-building at their best.
Operating in multiple cultural areas is less a matter of a Renaissance skillset and more a business necessity. Karl Lagerfeld changed his title of “fashion designer” into “creative director,” changing the nature of talent of those running fashion brands (he also famously said that if he weren’t in fashion, he’d be in advertising, such was his propensity for image-making). His shows were exercises in experimentation and creativity (like the one on the Great Wall in China just before the opening of Beijing Olympics), but it was Marc Jacobs who shaped art x fashion collaborations as we know them today. Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Stephen Sprouse, Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami all transformed LV products into their canvas.
Creative directors are in charge of making a brand culturally visible, making cross-cultural collaboration a savvy survival strategy. If fashion has a waning cultural influence (and market power), brands can move into areas that consumers find aspirational and spend money on (food, hospitality, wellness, art, furniture…) and keep building their cultural, social and economic capital there in order to ensure their longevity.
World-building based on cross-cultural collaborations creates fandoms. A person can have an Hermès taste or a Dior taste, and exclusive access to their worlds. They will wear branded hotel merch, dine in brand restaurants, and enjoy brand experiences - sometimes without buying a brand’s fashion products. It’s the brand world membership that matters, and that signals the social, cultural and economic status. It’s a taste visa.
