In March, when Zara announced a two-year creative partnership with John Galliano, it elicited quite the stir. The first collection, which lands in stores in September, will offer those of us who spent their adolescence admiring his archival runway images on Tumblr a chance to finally get in on the action. Willy Chavarria’s own Zara hookup and Christopher John Rogers’s collaboration with Old Navy may be smaller in scale but they still produce the giddy feeling of finding a high-low deal.
This morning, Stella McCartney revealed the lookbook for her forthcoming capsule collection with H&M, 21 years after her original partnership with the Swedish retailer. In 2005, the collab was such a success British Vogue deemed the event a “shopping riot.” One blue silk jumpsuit even ended up in the V&A Museum as an example of the designer’s signature style. That a mass market brand collab could give glitterati and laymen alike a case of the shoppies can be seen as early proof of fashion’s oncoming democratization, something that is only solidified by the British designer’s return to H&M in 2026.
At the time of its original release, McCartney’s H&M deal was the company’s second-ever design collaboration—the first being Karl Lagerfeld in 2004. For Lagerfeld, the slightly controversial H&M partnership transformed him from fashion’s king of lofty eccentricities to a designer with his own mainstream celebrity fame, so much so that he went on to star in ads for Volkswagen and direct a campaign for Diet Coke.
While these sorts of partnerships have become a mainstay of the last two decades, such mixing was not always seen in a positive light. When Halston signed a multi-year deal with J.C. Penney, it more or less killed his high fashion career. The ink was barely dry when Bergdorf Goodman stopped carrying his clothes. In 1983, The New York Times reported that while a new batch of customers embraced the sudden accessibility of a $24 Halston creation, Bergdorf’s then-president Ira Neimark, remarked, “We decided that designers, as well as retailers, have to decide who their customers are and proceed in that direction. Halston made his decision and we have made ours.” (It’s worth noting that in the same piece, Calvin Klein defended Halston’s right to appeal to multiple markets.)
McCartney told my colleague Liam Hess that in 2004, her collaboration still felt like a “risk;” however, the “cheap-chic” tides had already begun to turn. In 1999 Target struck gold partnering with architect Michael Graves, which then kicked off 20 years of subsequent designer collaborations. Among them, a multi-year deal with Isaac Mizrahi, Stephen Sprouse (fresh off of his collaboration with Louis Vuitton), Proenza Schouler, Alexander McQueen, Anna Sui, and Missoni. The popularity of the Missoni offering caused the retailer’s website to crash for the majority of launch day, prompting tweets from Jessica Alba and Jessica Simpson who lamented that they were missing out. Celebrities, they’re just like us.
#Bigger #Year #HighLow #Collabs
