The Madness of the Year: What Collaborations with the Mass Market Have Reached
"Muscovites staged a crush in the H & M store," “Slaughter in the H & M store in London”, “One and a half thousand people take the H & M flagship store in Paris by storm” - a news bulletin dated November 5, 2015, more reminiscent of reports from the scene of hostilities or scenes from a dystopia. On this day, the Balmain x H & M collection is on sale.
Fabulously expensive by the standards of the mass market, things were bought around the world in minutes, and after a couple of hours the jackets and dresses embroidered with glass beads and sequins settled on Avito, eBay and other private ad sites. They sold at an exorbitant price, almost at the price of a real Balmain - not only clothes, but also hangers with bags marked with brand symbols. One and a half months after the mass hysteria, I want to think with cold heads about what these events mean for fashion retail and, above all, for all of us.
Perhaps fashion historians should remember this date, because it was at this point that the process called "democratization of fashion", the initiator of which is considered to be the H & M company, reversed, well, or at least turned off somewhere clearly not there. It all started well. The Swedes were not the first to come up with the idea of marrying the mass market and designer fashion, before they were done by the enterprising employees of the American department stores JCPenney and Target, for whom Roy Halston and Isaac Mizrahi worked.
But it was H & M that turned this kind of collaboration into a successful marketing tool. The production capacities of the giant retailer plus the unique design of the authorship of Karl Lagerfeld, Ray Kawakubo or Jimmy Chu at the exit provided the average buyer with decent clothes and accessories at affordable prices. The most noble goals were to pursue: to get the broad masses closer acquainted with the creative work of designers, to inculcate taste and give people the opportunity for little money to wear not just a shirt, but a shirt with a fashionable and "talking" label - in general, desacralize and democratize fashion.
Collaboration line models are more like not a unique product, but pirated copies of designer products.
After a decade, more or less well-known brands have become overgrown with collaborations. In addition to Zara, whose experience is a separate topic for someone's dissertation, because this brand, being the most successful retailer of clothing and accessories in the world, not only does not indulge in collaborations, but in principle does not engage in advertising. Someone succeeded better, for example, the same network of Target department stores, which produced quite resonant collections with Altuzarra, Peter Pilotto, Rodarte and Missoni, and we would not point the finger at anyone worse.
As fashion became more and more influential pop-cultural phenomenon, and shopping turned into an important leisure activity, it was not enough to produce clothes. Now, if you wanted your things to sell well, you had to be associated with the expressions "fashion", "designer clothing" and "limited edition", even if they were not really produced in limited editions, and Designer clothes had a very mediated attitude.
If you soberly evaluate models from H & M collaborative lines, it becomes obvious that they are more like not a unique, specially designed product, but pirated copies of designer products: everything seems to be the same, but worse, because it is sewn from cheap fabrics and trimmed with poor-quality accessories. . And the company itself is positioning its collaborations precisely as a compilation, reissuing the most famous models of a certain designer in a democratic version.
This collapse happened just at the launch of the Balmain x H & M collection. By inviting Olivier Rousten, creative director of the French brand, who specializes in pompous outfits for social events, H & M first of all relied on the digital and pop cultural component of the project. The main advertising channel has become Olivier's Instagram, which followers are 1.6 million people.
Olivier biting his cheeks emphatically, he regularly “got himself married” with his bosom friends and in combination the most “popular” American pop stars: Kendall Jenner (43 million subscribers), Kylie Jenner (45 million), Gigi Hadid (7.2 million) and Bella Hadid (1.5 million), Carly Kloss (3.3 million) and Jordan Dunn (1.3 million), dressed in outfits from the collection. Those in turn, like the true heralds of the Apocalypse, carried the news of the upcoming event into their accounts. Given the total audience coverage, the hype turned out to be unimaginable, even shocking prices didn’t scare future buyers. By the time the collection hit the stores, it was so replicated in social networks that the fact of purchase began to seem like a decision of the collective mind, and not an individual. Ready plot for the novels of Philip Dick.
What happened afterwards — the pogroms of the stores, the fights, the nervous breakdowns of those who did not get anything, the gang of resellers — is quite natural. Of course, H & M’s marketing strategies turned out to be brilliantly precise, but at the same time they are quite clumsy and unpretentious. It would even be ridiculous to expect any other results, involving the Kardashian family in the project. If we take into account the fact that at the moment there is no more national phenomenon than six similar-haired black-haired women, in a sense, the democratization process of fashion is quite successful, it just goes to a new level. The level at which the retailer is less and less concealed by noble aspirations and puts more and more effort into collections to bring super-profits.
From a pragmatic compromise, the collaboration turned into a self-sufficient soap bubble.
If we measure the success of these categories, then the collaborations this year have finally won all of them, including the "designer fashion", an individual mass market and common sense. Previously, the fruits of such unions had characteristics that were difficult to compete with - an acceptable price for an average buyer with a noticeably higher quality and original design. But after the release of the H & M x Balmain collection, it became obvious that, with the former quality of the mass market, the price of collaboration models was moving towards the designer products by leaps and bounds.
A similar story happened with the Kanye West collection for adidas Originals. In fact, basic clothes and shoes from the Yeezy line of a completely democratic brand in general cost absolutely fabulous money, like this gray stretched sweater for 116 thousand rubles. It is no longer about such a captivating opportunity to buy for usual money a thing created under the auspices of a very expensive brand or iconic name. From a pragmatic compromise, the collaboration turned into a thing in itself, a self-sufficient soap bubble, which expanded to an incredible size. The circle closed: bags, shoes and dresses again became sacred objects, far from being democratic.
It is interesting to observe what such flirting with the base manifestations of human nature will lead to. Where is the boiling point, after which even the most devoted admirers of Kanye or Maison Margiela will wonder if they really need this bomber of unimportant quality that promises a ghostly empathic connection with the idol? Maybe we already crossed it?
Photo:Balmain x H & M