What is next for collaborations?
Connecting food, art, furniture, hospitality, sport … into a full-stack experience
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
Read the rest of this analysis on The Sociology of Business.
