photos:occasion dresses

In 1983, JC Penney signed up Halston to create a bargain-priced version of Ultrasuede, the decadent collection of party clothes that graced the backs of the Seventies disco posse. The line, named Halston III, ranged in price from $24 to $200. It was a disaster. Not only was it poorly received by customers, and eventually discontinued, but it had serious repercussions for Halston’s mainline business. High-end fashion retailers felt Halston had “cheapened” his image. Bergdorf Goodman promptly dropped his line. Halston, having sold the rights to his name, was fired from the company soon after, having damaged his label inestimably.

Why did it fail? Timing, it seems, is everything. Fast-forward to 2003 and the retail landscape had changed enough to make cheap-and-chic a winning formula, initially for Target, who signed up Isaac Mizrahi to great success. Mizrahi, a designer whose own luxury line had folded five years previously, continued to design Target lines until 2008, and sold as much as $300 million worth of clothes each year. His success helped pave the way for more successful high-low Target link-ups, including with Alexander McQueen, Rodarte, Proenza Schouler and Peter Pilotto – the latter being Net-a-Porter’s fastest selling collaboration ever.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the masstige market trickled across the pond, but 1993, when Designers at Debenhams began life, is a good guess. The launch was Terry Green’s idea (the Aston Martin-driving, country house-flaunting chief executive who transformed Debenhams’s fortunes in the Nineties) and he promptly signed up Philip Treacy to create a diffusion line of hats. Ben de Lisi followed in 1994 and Jasper Conran came on two years later – Conran is still one of the most successful designers on the roster, which now includes Julian Macdonald, John Rocha and Jenny Packham.

Macdonald, the self-styled sultan of sequins, has been particularly vocal about how lucrative his Debenhams link-up has been for his business. In 2014 he told me: “When I started working with Debenhams it was very much seen as degrading your own brand. Now, a lot of people think, ‘Let’s do one of those commercial lines on the high street, they’ll pay us a lot of money, we can sit back and enjoy ourselves.’ But for a lot of brands it’s a flash in the pan. You might have a name that’s a trend in fashion circles, but when you have to sell it all over Britain, especially overseas, you’re just a name on a hanger that nobody recognises.” No such worries for the Welsh designer, a former contestant on Strictly Come Dancing and the chief purveyor of glitzy glamour, whose Star by Julian Macdonald line now extends to homewares. “Some of my customers will buy a £20,000 prom dress from me but, you know, they’ve all got my £70 bed sheets as well!” he says.

H&M has worked the formula to similar success. In 2004 it launched its first designer collaboration, with Karl Lagerfeld. With coats and suits designed, in the designer’s words, for “slender and slim people”, and going for £100, the collection sold out within hours. Annual collaborations have been rolled out in its wake, with high-end names including Comme des Garçons, Isabel Marant, Lanvin, Alexander Wang and Balmain. But Lagerfeld, at least, won’t be a repeat partnership. Accusing H&M of “snobbery” for producing minimal quantities of his designs, just days after his collection had sold out, he said it had defeated his stated aim of making his designs available to the masses. “I find it embarrassing that H&M let down so many people,” he told Stern magazine at the time. “I don’t think that is very kind, especially for people in small towns and countries in eastern Europe. It is snobbery created by anti-snobbery.”

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