Fashion Collabs Are an Insult

The world does not need Blue Bottle sneakers or Harry Potter spatulas.

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Earlier this year, while waiting for the subway, I encountered one of the most revolting pairs of shoes I’ve ever seen on the feet of a fellow commuter. They were the unholy spawn of a Gucci loafer and an Adidas sneaker. The design mushed together the noncomplementary traits of both brands: a slender black-leather upper with Gucci’s signature brass horsebit hardware, three white stripes on either side, and an inch-tall wooden heel stamped with a golden Adidas trefoil logo. They were the footwear equivalent of semiformal gym shorts. They looked like the shoes of a meathead leprechaun.

The offending loafers are a product of the ubiquitous marketing tactic (and frequent aesthetic boondoggle) known as the collab. In the case of Gucci and Adidas, a sweeping product partnership between the two companies has yielded hundreds of pieces of co-branded clothing, shoes, and accessories since 2022: Logo bucket hats, ribbed-knit sweats, brightly colored leisure suits, handbags straight out of a Pan Am stewardess’s work wardrobe, a golf bag swathed in Gucci’s monogram fabric. These products have garnered an enormous amount of attention from celebrities and fashion media. In December, the college quarterback Caleb Williams wore a plaid Gucci x Adidas suit, complete with three stripes down the body of the jacket and each pant leg, to collect his Heisman Trophy.

Not all of the companies that undertake collabs will have the juice to charge $1,100 for horrendous shoes, but many, many consumer brands have tried their hand at their own version of the gambit. Hidden Valley, a salad-dressing company, and Van Leeuwen, an ice-cream company, released ranch-flavored ice cream. Dolce & Gabbana and Smeg introduced Sicilian-print appliances. Le Creuset and Warner Bros. teamed up for a Harry Potter–themed set of Spellcasting Spatulas.

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These pairings have become only more numerous, and if the concept of ranch ice cream didn’t already make it clear, their results have tended to get more surreal, more cynical, and more exhausting over time. Enough, already. Make the collabs stop.

Collab, as you have likely already surmised, refers to a collaboration. Everything about collabs is similarly obvious. When two brands love each other and want to make a baby, they draw up terms that usually entail working together on a set of new products that bear both parties’ branding. They then heavily advertise their release to their respective customer bases. If a collab meets a particularly enthusiastic response, these partnerships are sometimes extended for additional rounds of new products. But most are a one-off branding arbitrage, allowing each party to promote itself to a larger audience under the guise of their combined specialness.

Collabs happen in all kinds of consumer markets, but they’re especially popular in fashion and food because they provide a little bit of novelty and hype in markets where consumers can generally be persuaded to keep buying as long as there’s a constant churn of new products. In many cases, their primary purpose is promotional: A clothing brand or fast-food restaurant might release new products on its own to little fanfare or media attention, but when two brands collab, suddenly that’s news. And generating news is a more reliable source of consumer attention than traditional advertising by a mile. Similar motivations have long driven celebrity-endorsement deals and movie-themed lunch boxes, but collabs are distinct in that they involve two (or, exhaustingly, sometimes now three or more) established consumer brands.

The collab trend as Americans currently know it began around the turn of the millennium, in the then-humble environs of Target. In 1999, the retailer, largely regarded at the time as just another big-box discount store, hired the architect Michael Graves to design a small line of affordable housewares. The products were a huge hit, and in 2003, Target expanded into fashion collabs with a line from the designer Isaac Mizrahi; a year later, the fast-fashion behemoth H&M took a page from Target’s playbook and released a collection with another big-name designer, Karl Lagerfeld. Both companies still regularly partner with high-end brands for limited runs of clothing and accessories, and the releases are often still met with shelf-clearing consumer mania. In one particularly memorable instance, Target’s website crashed under the rush of people trying to buy inexpensive knitwear and home decor from the luxury-fashion company Missoni. That, too, is another essential element of the collab: artificial scarcity, wielded (the collaborators hope) to whip people into a buying frenzy.

Around the same time that Target and H&M were spinning up their first high-low lines and basking in the glow of their newfound association with luxury, the designer Marc Jacobs, then the creative director at Louis Vuitton, was proving that the tactic could work even when there was no promise to make anything affordable. Vuitton released its first collection of bags embellished by the artist Stephen Sprouse in 2001. More artist mash-ups would follow, including with Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami. Vuitton, which until Jacobs’s arrival had been a staid, somewhat boring luggage and handbag brand, got a dose of art-world cool; the artists got face time with the brand’s enormous, moneyed clientele. All told, the brand has been part of some of the most lucrative collabs of all time. In 2017, Vuitton’s collab with the streetwear brand Supreme—then already highly influential for its “drop” model of releasing new inventory, which milks artificial scarcity for all it’s worth—was met with only slightly less of a media blitz than the moon landing.

As with anything, there are good collabs and bad collabs. The good ones have some sort of clear internal logic for why they should exist. In fashion, an apparel company might turn over its enormous design and manufacturing resources to an up-and-coming talent, which marks the brand as participants in the zeitgeist, provides exposure and a significant paycheck to a young designer, and yields a more interesting, forward-thinking product than the company would generate on its own. Other times, there’s some kind of reasonable affinity between two different companies’ audiences, such as when New Balance designed a few pairs of shoes with the medical-scrubs brand Figs. (Health-care workers tend to be influential in the sneaker market in ways that go largely unrecognized; nurses played a notable role in popularizing Hokas, for example.) A good collab doesn’t guarantee a good product—the larger partner might not cede enough creative control, among other things—but it at least presents an opportunity for one.

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The bad collabs—which are, I would argue, most of them—are more like consumer-brand Mad Libs. They generate products that make no clear case for their own existence, such as when Kraft and Juicy Couture got together to produce some bedazzled velour mayonnaise-themed tracksuits, or New Balance’s recent collab with Blue Bottle Coffee, which is just a pair of white sneakers with the coffee brand’s logo on the back. (New Balance’s hit-or-miss collabs are a real inside you there are two wolves situation.) But trying to judge a collab on its design merits is beside the point. The primary value created in these scenarios is in the press release announcing them, which might get them written up in the media as if their existence is of real import to the reading public, or which might make them the subject of some viral social-media posts. Whether the attention is positive or negative scarcely matters. The brands involved have set up shop in a corner of your brain, even if for just a few moments, and that’s all they wanted to do in the first place.

If, say, 95 percent of this garbage vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, no one would miss it. You might have noticed by now that we’ve talked a lot about what the companies involved in collabs get out of their continued popularity, and not very much about what regular people get from having this constant churn of largely meaningless novelty shoved in our faces. That’s because, in most cases, actual consumers get nothing except more junk. This sort of branding chicanery is an exercise that creates value on paper, but rarely ever gleans anything meaningful in reality. Most collabs—even many of the plausibly good ones—are little more than a status hustle. A set of existing signifiers is recompiled, and their acquisition is turned into a competition to see who can shop the best and spend the most money. The prize is a pair of shoes that cost $1,100 and look so ugly that beholding them feels like a sin against God.