Even before “Wicked” opened, the movie’s signature green and pink colors were turning up everywhere, from drinks topped with matcha foam at Starbucks to aisles lined with merch at Target. This cultural bludgeoning was, of course, orchestrated. Today, not even large marketing budgets can achieve such ubiquity without help.
Attention has become fractured. Audiences, siloed in their social-media feeds and choose-your-own-adventure streaming sites, are ever harder to reach. Only by partnering up, like “Barbie” did by collaborating with 165 brands last year, can a promotional campaign become truly inescapable. “Wicked” went even bigger, teaming up with over 400 brands to ensure a saturation that would be, in the words of Universal Pictures’ chief marketing officer Michael Moses, “just short of obnoxious.”
It’s just the latest example of how the culture industry has come to rely on collaborations. Brands pair up with other brands in endless permutations. Fashion companies and visual artists routinely partner, as in the case of Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami, whose landmark collaboration will soon relaunch. Around a third of Billboard’s Hot 100 songs involve a guest feature or collab (compared to under 10 percent a generation ago). At a time when culture feels stagnant, collaborations help artists and brands generate an air of originality without having to innovate.
This frisson of newness has often been enough to capture media attention and entice consumers. But as commercial alliances have proliferated, their effect has diminished. Fatigue is setting in. “Wicked” participated in more than twice as many collaborations as “Barbie,” yet brought in only half its opening-weekend box-office take worldwide.
Could it be that we’ve reached “peak collab?”
Collaborations have become formulaic, fusing random elements from all corners of culture, until everything seems fungible: Baccarat and Hello Kitty, Louvre and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” N.H.L. and Lululemon, M&M’s and KateSpade. The ease with which such diverse offerings are lumped together only exacerbates the feeling of monotony and exhaustion. All culture is deployed in the same way, as if what distinguishes it — its history, form, industry or genre — couldn’t matter less. Collaborations appear increasingly desperate, more about profit than creative synergy or shared values. Louis Vuitton’s upcoming Murakami re-edition promises to be “a surefire sales smash,” as Highsnobiety put it, even if it’s also “a cash-conscious maneuver reflective of tumbling luxury revenues.”
But the formula plays well to the algorithms that power social media and dictate what we see online. Designed to anticipate what we want, these algorithms favor content with a proven history — the safe and familiar over the experimental and untested. New content composed of pre-existing elements, like mash-ups of established artists and brands, hits the sweet spot. This preference has only amplified the incentives leading culture away from the lone visionary and toward joint authorship for decades. In hip-hop, guest features started as a means of creative exchange before proving their value as a commercial draw.
The fashion industry discovered that collaborations were good business, too. Louis Vuitton’s 13-year collaboration with Murakami, beginning in 2002, showed luxury brands that partnering with visual artists could broaden their appeal and boost sales. In 2013 it was reported that the artist’s products generated roughly 10 percent of Louis Vuitton’s revenue . As luxury grew more accessible — with brands ramping up production and opening flagships around the world — the industry increasingly looked to visual art to cultivate an association that would safeguard its cachet and bolster its exclusivity.
Mass-market retailers took note. Target launched its first designer capsule collection in 2003 with Isaac Mizrahi; H&M followed suit in 2004 with Karl Lagerfeld. By agreeing to collaborate, high fashion willingly dismantled the boundary that had separated it from its more commercial counterpart, just as visual art had done in opening itself up to luxury. In return, prominent artists and high-end designers won new visibility and even mainstream fame.
But the behemoth brands behind the collaborations were the biggest beneficiaries, whether Target or Louis Vuitton. They co-opted the rarefied and elite spheres they had been defined against. Art had always posed a subtle threat to luxury fashion: Its very existence underscored the relative triviality of luxury products. Luxury fashion likewise stood in vivid contrast to fast fashion’s inferior quality and lack of distinctiveness. Collaborations muddied these waters: High and low became part of the same continuum. H&M’s collaborations drove sales (by 24 percent the month the Lagerfeld collection hit stores) but they burnished the brand’s image even more. Consumers took to calling Target “Tar-zhay,” a Frenchified pronunciation playfully suggestive of sophistication. The retail giant responded by taking out all of the ads in a 2005 issue of The New Yorker. Mass retail saw its consumer base widen as its prestige grew.
Before the Lagerfeld collection, H&M had always launched its promotional campaigns and new products concurrently. But collaborations taught the brand to build buzz over time, teasing partnerships (like its forthcoming one with the Belgian designer Glenn Martens) months in advance. In this sense, collaborations gave rise to our hype culture. But hype culture also left its imprint on collaborations, transforming them, above all, into media events and stripping away the pretense of creative dialogue.
Today’s collaborations are publicity machines, churning out attention regardless of their quality or uniqueness. The medium — the collaboration as brute fact — is the message. But what happens when the formula itself grows tired? Maybe artists and brands no longer need to explicitly collaborate when their interests converge. Like Taylor Swift and the N.F.L., whose unofficial relationship intensified when the pop star started dating the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, increasing female viewership, expanding Mr. Kelce’s fame beyond football and making Ms. Swift completely inescapable. Or Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams, whose releases this year reinforced and amplified each other. Shortly after Williams, the creative director for men’s wear at Louis Vuitton debuted a Western-themed collection, Beyoncé sported a look from the collection to the Grammys and announced her first country album. By September, GQ was calling cowboycore this year’s “defining aesthetic.”
These were collaborations in effect, if not in name. Their comparative subtlety — that they were not explicit partnerships marked by a telltale “x” — was part of their success. Just as ads that don’t look like ads are often effective, so too are collaborations that don’t look like collaborations.
This isn’t a rejection of collaboration as much as its complete assimilation. It reflects a culture in which the savviest creators can’t help but see their efforts through the eyes of marketers. Social media requires that artists be at once promoters and entrepreneurs. Rather than making a cultural work and then marketing it, they are encouraged to bring their understanding of online virality, merchandising, and cross-promotion into the creative process. And, indeed, promotion becomes intrinsic to the work itself. Do we care if we’re watching a feature-length advertisement (like “Barbie”) or listening to a song that appears tailor-made for an ad campaign (like “Levii’s Jeans”)? Bombarded and sometimes weary, we hardly have the time or inclination to ask. The collaborators are counting on it.
Natasha Degen is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the author of “Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion After Warhol.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
