The Week That Luxury Collabs Ate Each Other
What happens when Louis Vuitton, Nike, Dior, ERL, Balenciaga, and adidas all debut collaborations in the same week? Not much, actually.
It's like we said not so long ago: luxury labels have lost the collaboration plot. What was once a uniquely sneaker-related problem has now infected the fashion biz from the bottom up.
What was once an earth-shattering occurrence has become a bi-weekly eyebrow raise at best.
Louis Vuitton x Supreme shook the world because it was the first time two equally titanic brands from different sides of the fashion fence got together. Two different eras of streetwear united in a major way with Palace Skateboards x Ralph Lauren and Dior x Air Jordan 1 was so many sneaker customizers' wet dreams made real.
It's not even that successive luxury/street tie-ins aren't interesting anymore, it's just that we've seen it all before, with brands running the risk of cannibalizing each other's thunder as their collaborations begin running together. Been there, copped that.
Which, again, isn't to say that Louis Vuitton x Nike, Balenciaga x adidas, nor ERL x Dior don't deserve to exist or aren't worth making a big deal about.
Hell, this very site wrote about Balenciaga x adidas no fewer than five times so it ain't like we don't care.
It's just that we all drown in wave after wave of newness. The world moves so quickly that you can't smell the roses, let alone appreciate the creative vision that multiple design teams assembled in a quarter of the time it used to take.
How could anyone possibly take the time necessary to soak in the archival remixing at Dior x ERL, the craft that goes into each Louis Vuitton Air Force 1, or the post-capitalist cheekiness of Balenciaga's latest presentation?
I mean, the Met Gala — which wasn't even a month ago, mind you — is a great example of this very real problem of the now: weeks if not months of labor exerted in ateliers across the globe was boiled down to a 24-hour blur, never to be spoken of again (except, perhaps, only in passing prior to next year's event).
The funny thing is, not only did all of the above big-name collabs launch this week, YEEZY GAP dropped its latest collection and Gucci debuted its latest runway show (and a collaborative smart ring and a Roblox city and a new bag line and...)
And we hardly had time to take any of it in because, in this business, to stop moving is to be left behind is to die.
Really, the problem is bigger than any one brand can handle: it's the fashion industry's fault. We (rightly) hate fast-fashion but its turbo-turnover has giddy-up'd the business at large.
In the same way that social media killed our short-term attention spans, scroll culture has making it so that everything has to happen yesterday or else be rendered irrelevant.
We're at a point where even the luxury juggernauts are speeding through their seasonal collections, collaborations, and even creative directors. It just ain't sustainable, in every sense of the word.
This is less of a plea for solutions (they ain't coming) and more a stark realization, crystalized once again by the overwhelming speed in which we collectively indulged in headline-shattering collaborations that each could've easily been the biggest fashion moment of the year where we still living in The Before Time.
But the fashion cycle is no longer a twirling carousal, patiently revolving at its own leisure.
It's now a blistering rollercoaster, blasting through peaks and valleys with more G-force than the human body was meant to withstand. It's a fun ride, sure, but the thrills are short-lived.
