The co-branding mania just won’t stop. It started 25 years ago with the Hamburg luxury queen Jil Sander, when she had the idea of selling sneakers in cooperation with Puma. They were sewn from finer leather but otherwise looked like regular Pumas (apart from the small gold Jil Sander lettering above the Puma stripe). The shoes brought sportswear know-how to high fashion, made Jil Sander look cooler and Puma a little more elegant. Win-win for both sides.
This example was followed by countless fashion co-workings (Jeremy Scott x Adidas, the H&M collections with Lanvin and Balmain, most recently Gucci x Balenciaga and Fendi x Versace) as well as the realization that brand awareness among fashion fans is so high that you can practically choose any two Brands can be thrown together without the recognition value and image of the individual brands suffering. The “x”, the multiplication sign, guarantees attention.
Three brands, nested into one product: the new thing!
So much for the historical context as we move into a new age, namely that of triple co-branding. It’s getting rather confusing here, dear reader, but you can do it: Before his death, Virgil Abloh, as chief designer of the Louis Vuitton men’s line, designed a few pairs of Louis Vuitton x Nike Air Force 1 sneakers in cooperation with Nike . In addition to the Nike swoosh and the Louis Vuitton monogram, they also feature the trademark of Abloh’s own brand Off-White, i.e. the quotation marks: “Air”.
Three brands, nested into one product: the new thing! The two-collab was the little fling, the triple-collab is the hot ménage à trois, where you don’t know exactly who is actually on top and who is on the bottom. Exciting? In any case, the hype surrounding the aforementioned sneakers (which, at the time of going to press, it was not yet clear whether they would actually be on the market) is not simply multiplied, but exponential.
Missing Kanye West, sorry: Ye. He has been collaborating with Gap (which means YZY then) for about a year with his Yeezy brand, and now he is also collaborating with Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s chief designer, for a collection. The fact that, like Ye, he has recently given up his last name and only wants to be called Demna, is definitely to be welcomed. So you finally save a few characters, while the cooperations are getting longer and longer. It should be called “Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga”. Why not BalenciaGap by YZY? That would have been 14 characters, two fuck you, shorter.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 03/2022.