BRIDGE THE GAP

How can established labels step up their game with a booming ecosystem full of young designers and upcoming labels? Prestige brands answer with collaborations and new extensions

- SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

“For a label to progress, it is important for the brand to expand and create new products,” says designer Payal Singhal, who has built her brand by merging traditional aesthetics with experimental and future-looking designs – and the label has held its edge since its first steps in 1999. While the designer has completed over two decades in the industry, she has gleaned, like many other designers in the fashion roster, that design alone cannot guarantee success and longevity for brands.

It is the universal truth that creatives around the globe have come to understand. The occupation of “designer” refers to being multi-hyphenate today. You can hardly be a one-trick pony to keep up with the tides of change. The collaboration boom attests to that. In 2017, when Supreme launched its collaboration with Louis Vuitton, it brought a fanlike response unlike any other that the brand had ever seen. There have been many since, and regardless of being good or bad, these ventures never fail to incite a response. Take for example the Gucci and Balenciaga partnership for the Italian house’s 100th-anniversary collection, or the ‘Fendace’ collection, which was categorically denounced as a collaboration by the leaders of the two houses in an attempt to keep things interesting – and a cut above the typical, overly stimulated collaboration strategy.