CHAPTER THREE: MASS BRANDS’ BIG LUXURY AMBITION
A few weeks ago, Zara announced a partnership with Samuel Ross – an award-winning designer who is most known for his work alongside Virgil Abloh as well as founding his own brand A-COLD-WALL*. But unlike every other collaboration between a mass fashion brand and a luxury fashion designer, this one is supposed to be an ongoing multi-year line housed under Ross’s studio SR_A, which could mean that Zara’s long-term plan is not only to create luxury association but perhaps, even become luxury. “Zara is clearly building a platform where they can empower emerging designers, and even creators, influencers and celebrities,” Tony Wang told Financial Times. “The next major fashion group might come from a high-street brand – the next LVMH or Richemont or OTB Group. It feels like it’s hard to enter that through the luxury fashion route now. So I wonder if a Zara or an H&M would eventually try to take equity positions in emerging designers as part of a long-term strategy, to become the next LVMH or Kering.”
This would explain why in the past couple of years, mass fashion brands started actively tapping luxury fashion talent, investing in “studio” lines, and participating in New York, London, and Paris Fashion Weeks. Former Head Designer at YSL Stefano Pilati made a capsule collection for Zara which was shot by Steve Maisel and modeled by Gisele Bündchen and Pilati himself. Gap hired Zac Posen to lead GapSudio as well as the creative, design, and marketing across their portfolio and went to The Met Gala with Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Cannes with Anne Hathaway. H&M snapped up Glenn Martens for a capsule collection right before his move from Diesel to Margiela. Uniqlo has been teaming up on bi-annual releases with JW Anderson since 2017 and most recently brought in ex-Artistic Director at Chloé and Givenchy Clare Waight Keller as their in-house CD. And J.Crew released sheer dresses and tiny bottoms in collaboration with New York’s chief cool girl Maryam Nassir Zadeh.
The idea behind these collaborations is for the mass brands to provide the infrastructure and resources necessary for the “scene cool” talent to become mainstream, and for the talent to drive media and industry buzz as well as earn street credit among fashion insiders – all of which ultimately trickles down to the mass brands’ bottom line. When Salomon releases a limited edition sneaker with Sandy Liang, they also end up selling a bunch of baseline shoes to the people who did not manage to shop the collab. When On designed a shoe in collaboration with Loewe, it was a major push in their transition from a technical to a lifestyle fashion brand and a reason for people outside of the running community to take a second look at their website. People who walked into Uniqlo to get a pair of jeans from the JW Anderson drop, likely picked up a few t-shirts and socks from the basics collection on their way out of the store.
But while so many successful rebrand and growth stories of the past decade have been largely driven by this type of collaborations, it doesn’t mean that doing something like this automatically makes a difference – the key to creating long-lasting impact is in precision, timing, and detail. For example, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan might have owned the music charts this past summer but when brands vying for a comeback – Converse, Gap, and H&M – dropped a huge amount of money to bring them into their campaigns and activations, they failed to create long-lasting marketing moments and ended up as tiny blips in the zeitgeist. Gap x Madhappy collaboration that starred Devon Lee Carlson and so clearly targeted Gen Alpha and Gen Z with its campaign visuals and product lineup, was likely much more impactful for the business. Peter Do’s collaboration with Banana Republic went array because of the fabrics, pricing, and other not so sexy business details even though conceptually, it made perfect sense. Kaia Gerber and Cindy Crawford modeling for Zara Streaming is a buzzy but confusing headline, making it the type of partnership that more people want to analyze and write about than shop as opposed to something like Clare Keller’s or JW Anderson’s capsule collections for Uniqlo where the pieces and styling speak for themselves.
“If Louis Vuitton can have ball gowns that they don’t produce on a red carpet in order to sell luggage, why can’t Gap have a T-shirt gown on the red carpet? But we’ll actually produce it,” Zac Posen told Vogue earlier this year. But even though something like this makes sense on a conceptual level, it starts to fall apart when it comes to strategy. When Louis Vuitton makes a custom dress for a red carpet event, not only do they get mass brand exposure, they also show off their creativity and craftsmanship and advertise their couture services which make up a nice share of their business, to the VIPs. When Gap puts Anne Hathaway in a button-up dress, it doesn’t say much more than what we already know about the brand – their PR is working overtime and Zac Posen is a great couturier. When New Balance releases a crazy limited edition pair of 550s, it’s clear how the buzz around that collection converts into baseline model sales. When JW Anderson designs a capsule for Uniqlo, it can be easily styled together with the brand’s core collection pieces. When Gap releases something that’s so widely disconnected from their core offering both in the product sense and the spirit, it’s tough to see the same connection, especially given the importance of consistent strategy and messaging as the brand is trying to reinvent itself.
There are a couple of major fallacies in flipping luxury fashion’s tiered offering model and copy pasting it as a strategy for mass brands. It feels equally dishonest for luxury brands to hike up their prices and double down on the craftsmanship and creativity messaging as the production value of their products continues to decline, as it is for mass brands to capitalize on this trend by increasing their marketing spend and hiring luxury talent to appeal to the tastemaker crowd without investing into a solid core product offering with a cohesive vision first. Plus, the idea that fashion fanatics and higher status shoppers need a separate collection that speaks directly to them to get excited about a mass brand is awfully misguided. Basic garments, like nice roomy pants, cozy puffer coats and sturdy menswear shirts, offer an endless room for experimentation and an opportunity to coin iconic styles in the world where fashion is as genderless and high-low as ever. Obviously, it’s a challenge to create products that appeal to a wide range of demographics at once while also making sure that the materials, production costs, pricing and other business details make sense at the same time. And yet, it’s unclear how breaking the audience up into small segments and marketing to all of them separately is that much cheaper or easier, especially as you try to make all of these efforts align at the top strategy level.
And it doesn’t end there – looking up to their luxury counterparts, mass brands are fully leaning into the ‘hyper-optimization’ and ‘marvelization’ of their brands. Gap’s CEO Richard Dickson who came to the brand from Mattel is already thinking about pants in sweaters in the Barbie universe terms. Could Gap, originally a records and jeans shop, have a record label? Could Banana Republic operate a line of hotels? It’s always worrisome when these types of visionary ideas pop up in meeting rooms of companies that have plenty of low-hanging fruit design, product, and marketing adjustments to make. But it’s even scarier when a brand starts actively moving in this direction before making any progress in bringing their core business back. For example, when Zara opens a cafe in their men’s store in Madrid, essentially replicating a staple brand tactic created by luxury brands, like Prada and Alaïa, as well as elevated lifestyle brands, like Aime Leon Dore and Supreme, it’s unclear exactly what it’s supposed to accomplish. When a luxury brand enters hospitality, it’s either building out a lifestyle universe for their high spenders through hotel and resort collaborations or expanding their product offering into the masses via coffee shops and cafes. And a lot of times, this is the type of brand marketing that ends up diluting the value of their brands. It makes no sense for a mass brand to replicate this strategy, hoping to score luxury association points to revive their dead brands. The main reason why H&M and Zara declined is because the quality of their product fell. Opening a cafe feels like an unnecessary marketing spend when there is work to be done in the core business of the brand.
Another problem is that all these grand ideas about the way both mass and luxury fashion can shape culture often boil down to just working with buzzy industry and celebrity talent and miss major opportunities to actually touch people’s lives. On the business side, it’s critical to understand the shifting dynamics of how and where people want to shop and what they spend money on outside of fashion. On the creative side, it’s wild how little value most fashion brands assign to the way people’s lives have changed in the past few years – from work sliding into a weird space between home and the office to the lifestyle implications of the radical political and technological shifts happening in some of the industry’s top markets. For example, when women’s bodies become a political topic, the decisions around how women dress go beyond the artists they enjoy and the trends they see on TikTok, and factor in how they want to show up in a society that’s so eager to censor and regulate them. And even on the lighter note, fashion should at least try to understand how women’s priorities and lifestyles have changed over the past decade – how they are recontextualizing their sexuality, how they think about their careers, and which private little moments they enjoy. It takes much more to touch and shape culture than hiring pop stars and downtown influencers to wear your brand’s clothes and repeat the message your audience has already heard time and time again – cool hot people are wearing this and so should you.
A mass brand that’s tapping into culture more or less successfully is Abercrombie. It may not be as sexy as hiring an “it literally girl” to write a collection of short stories to accompany a seasonal campaign, like Prada, but it is impactful to their business and brand. Abercrombie’s core target demo is young millennials which is representative of a huge swath of America. “They are living their best lives. There’s nothing better than being a young millennial. They live for the long weekend. Monday would come along and the most important thing for them was what was happening the next weekend,” Abercrombie's CEO Fran Horowitz told WWD a little over a year ago. So, the team created a 96-hour calendar of what these consumers could be up to during the weekend – bachelorette parties, weddings, trips, and activities with their friends – and made sure Abercrombie's product mix can dress them for all of these events. And sure, it’s jeans, sweaters, and dresses that look like they came straight from Pinterest but it’s also honest, cohesive, and representative of where and how a certain type of young millennial in America chooses to shop. So, it’s hardly surprising that the business started seeing a positive shift by the end of 2019, and brands like Reformation, Artizia, and Sezane, that have followed a similar strategy, take up a huge share of young millennials’ closets and wallets.
And that’s not to say that if a brand has mass commercial aspirations, it has to settle for boring basic pieces and campaigns. A walking masterclass in understanding culture through the everyday lives of regular people rather than the creative output of the coastal elites is Phoebe Philo who dressed cool party girls at Chloe and then confident, tasteful young women at Celine – ultimately shaping the quiet luxury style that trickled down into the masses through brands like Cos and H&M. Her namesake brand Phoebe Philo is now a major part of the greater cultural conversations about the way Gen X women are rearranging priorities in their lives and recontextualizing their sexuality, alongside Miranda July’s book All Fours and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. Zara had such an incredible opportunity to weigh in on these conversations when they released a capsule with Kate Moss and cast Cindy Crawford in their live shopping campaign but unfortunately, the stories around those collaborations were reduced to having big luxury fashion names involved with a high-street brand.
In general, it feels like mass fashion brands are so caught up in their desperate desire to regain their relevance that they forget the most important page in the luxury fashion’s playbook. They can hire luxury designers and pay high-profile influencers and celebrities to star in their campaigns and attend their events. They can open cafes, hotels, and restaurants and host expensive activations. They can zoom out to the brand universe level and fantasize their ideas can spill out into the bordering industries. But at the end of the day, if they don’t have a unique point of view and something interesting to say at the core of their business, all of these efforts add up to is a boring business theater rather than any type of cultural influence that can revive and support the brand long-term.
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