When the Celebrity Collaboration Is All Celebrity, No Collaboration
The celebrity collaboration was once so simple and so stale. Company calls up famous friend, slaps their name on a product, collects cash. But, now, a couple generational talents are reshaping the field of play, proving that a celebrity collaboration need not even include a collaboration as we once knew it. In terms of product, the star alone will suffice.
A little over a year ago, Levi's had no idea it was going to collaborate with Beyoncé. When the singer dropped Cowboy Carter in March 2024, the denim giant was as surprised by "Levii's Jeans" as anyone else.
Levi's seized the moment. With heroic speed, it prepped multiple Beyoncé-starring campaigns for a multi-month rollout that began in September. The premise is simple: In each spot, Beyoncé strolls through quintessentially Americana locales — in the most recent one, Beyoncé hangs at a New Jersey diner — wearing quintessentially Americana Levi's.
It's so simple, in fact, that the clothes worn by Beyoncé in each ad were available at nearly any Levi's store in the world even before the campaigns ever premiered.
No collaborative clothes, no limited editions, just ordinary Levi's product elevated by an extraordinary person.
Similarly, in the press release announcing their longterm team-up, On said that Zendaya would "reimagine and collaborate on designs and future collections," emphasizing a level of creative control that goes beyond mere endorsement (On maintains likeminded relationships with FKA Twigs and Roger Federer, an early investor).
It's not entirely clear how much, if any, direction Zendaya had on the bodysuits and sneakers that debuted in her latest On ad, which premiered mere days prior to Beyoncé's April Levi's ad.
Still, the space-age spot feels less Zendaya x On than Zendaya for On as Zendaya sees fit. It's indicative of this new era of celebrity collaborations where the collaborative product is the celeb's vision, made manifest by a high-powered partner. These is the era of all celebrity, no collaboration.
That is, in place of collaborative product, there is now collaborative project. Not a one-off joint effort that consumers buy, wear, and dispose but a big-picture partnership that at least partially reshapes the company in the image of a famous face.
We're talking something entirely separate from the smart stunt casting epitomized by Marc Jacobs' Heaven and Kim Kardashian's SKIMS, the unimpeachable champs of look-who-they-got-to-model-for-them.
But those are cameos. Beyoncé and Zendaya are leading long-term partnerships that redefine the entire notion of celebrity collaboration. Here, clothes are secondary, incidental even. The stars, and their respective tastes, are everything. All celebrity, no collaboration.
