H & M’s Ongoing High-Fashion Experiment

H& M launched its first-ever designer collaboration, with the Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld, eleven years ago, in November of 2004. My wife, a fashion illustrator, was sure something historic was in the offing, and she convinced me to go with her to check it out. We arrived at H & M’s flagship store, on Fifth Avenue, shortly before the doors opened, at 9 A.M. A line of men and women, ranging from twentysomethings to senior citizens, and dressed in everything from jeans to luxury labels, snaked down Fifth and around the block. Inside, they fought their way through the crowds, garments heaped over their arms; they stripped to their underwear in the aisles to try things on. In the melee, I managed to grab and try on a black military-style wool-and-cashmere overcoat. Cut long and slim, it elongated my frame, narrowed it, lent it a subtle drama that touched off fantasies of myself as a windswept Byronic wanderer (as opposed to a middle-aged deskbound writer). The price: a hundred and forty-nine dollars. A Lagerfeld original would have cost a thousand dollars. I bought two. I still wear that coat, and strangers still stop me in the street to ask where I got it. The backup, tags intact, is stuffed at the back of my closet, ready to be called into service when the original starts to look shabby.



Donald Schneider, who is now the creative director of H & M, came up with the idea of that first collaboration with Lagerfeld. At the time, Schneider ran a fashion-consulting firm hired by H & M to review its advertising campaigns, and he had worked for eight years as the art director of Vogue Paris. A soft-spoken German now in his mid-fifties, with glinting gray stubble and a bald head, he continues to dream up, and oversee, the collaborations today. When I met with him in June, at a photo shoot for the Balmain launch, I admitted that I had been among the hoards who lined up for the Lagerfeld début, and that I scored the black military-style overcoat. He nodded vigorously and said, “a fantastic piece,” adding that he is still wearing the suit jacket from that collection, and still gets compliments on it. Up to that point, he said, anyone who mentioned an H & M ad campaign would talk primarily about the models. “I wondered, could we do a campaign where people talked about the fashion?”