Fashion Brands Are Now Partnering With Media Titans to Spur Significant Sales Boost

When the Swedish apparel retailer signed up Karl Lagerfeld to design a limited-time collection in 2004, it raised hackles in haute couture circles. But after the entire Karl Lagerfeld x H&M collection sold out in a few hours, H&M never looked back. For the ensuing 20 years, it signed deals with a who’s who of runway legends including Stella McCartney, Sonia Rykiel, Versace, and Balmain.

Last week, H&M announced yet another collaboration. But something’s different this time out. The creative guest isn’t a Paris couturier—it’s a TV show.

HBO Original Series’ The White Lotus peers at the peccadillos of the guests and employees of a fictional luxe resort bearing the show’s name. And while the characters aren’t always beautiful, their outfits are. H&M’s 25-piece collection of chiffon dresses, ruffle-trimmed pants, and chromatic kaftans took its creative cues from the show, which drew an audience of 2.4 million for its season three premiere. Most of the goods are already sold out.

But H&M’s latest collab is significant for more than its sales. It’s the latest example of fashion’s cult of collaboration stretching to include media properties.

On the same day that the White Lotus collection debuted, J. Crew announced a line created with The New Yorker. Universal’s 2024 film Wicked saw capsule collections with clothing brands including Zac Posen and Bloomingdale’s house label Aqua. Boohoo, Gap, and Smash + Tess were among the labels to launch collections tied to the Barbie movie in 2023. A year before that, men’s clothing brand Knickerbocker debuted collections themed after two Gotham media institutions, New York magazine and The New York Times.

Of course, fashion labels are so collab happy these days that nearly any brand is a potential suitor. (Forever 21 really did put out a Cheetos collection in 2019.) But while media partnerships are a rarer species than other sorts of fashion collaborations, they make sense for the same reasons.

“Whenever a brand can leverage an existing affinity or behavior instead of starting from scratch, it can provide a quick and significant sales boost by tapping into consumers’ emotional connection to the entertainment property and the partner brand,” said marketing strategist Ian Baer, founder and chief executive at agency Sooth.

HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery clearly understood the potential of that emotional connection. Instead of just stamping its name on a bunch of frilly summer wear, the series made its costume designer Alex Bovaird available to the H&M design team, giving the collection unassailable bona fides. (The series also created boutique collections with travel accessories maker Away and beauty brand Kiehl’s Since 1851).

“The White Lotus is a cultural phenomenon,” WBD’s head of global consumer products Robert Oberschelp said. “These collaborations are giving fans the chance to be part of that experience, extending the world of The White Lotus beyond the screen and into their everyday lives.”

This same kind of extension describes The New Yorker’s reason for a fashion partnership, too.

“We launched The New Yorker Store a few years ago and found that our readers are eager to wear their love of the magazine on their sleeves, so to speak, with New Yorker-branded merchandise,” the magazine’s creative director Nicholas Blechman told ADWEEK. “As we prepared to celebrate our 100th anniversary, we knew we wanted to mark the occasion with a particularly special collection. J. Crew [is] a legacy brand, like ours, with a strong sense of heritage and a commitment to quality.”

One liability of these limited-time offerings is that they’re, well, limited. Both clothing brands and media properties have a small window of time to accrue some benefit from the deal—be it sales, publicity, or both. And while fans snapped up most of J. Crew’s New Yorker pieces and H&M’s White Lotus stuff, Zac Posen’s Wicked-themed dresses, and Crocs’ green Elphaba clogs were on steep markdown at press time.

This points out another trend when it comes to apparel collaborations: there appear to be too many of them. Last year, a poll conducted by Highsnobiety found that 44% of fashion collabs are “boring” and 67% would like to see fewer of them.