What’s the deal with all the artist × brand collabs?

These days, you don’t need to go to a gallery to see work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yves Klein or Mike Kelley – you can see it on people, on the street. In recent years, the steady drop-drop-drop of artists’ estates collaborating with fashion brands has turned into a torrent. Try this next time you’re in town, count how many collabs you can spot: Tom of Finland × JW Anderson, Basquiat × H&M, Kusama × Louis Vuitton, Mapplethorpe × Raf Simons, Warhol × Calvin Klein, Basquiat × Virgil Abloh, Mike Kelley × Supreme, Yves Klein × North Face, Haring × Coach, Haring × Swatch, Haring × Uniqlo, Haring × Primark. Over the past decade, fashion houses and clothes makers have jumped onto a trend for collaborating with artists’ estates. Applying their work, their likeness or their vaguely defined style to clothes, accessories, homeware… you name it.

In one sense, they’re continuing a great tradition of fine art and high fashion creative crossovers, started arguably in 1937 when the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli approached the Surrealists Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau to license their work and names for her haute couture. This set the trend for the rest of the 20th century. In the ‘60s, Andy Warhol worked with Yves Saint Laurent on ‘souper’ dresses, made of fabric printed with ‘Warhol’s’ infamous image of a Campbell’s soup can. The ‘90s collaboration between Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton resulted in the multicoloured monogrammed LV Speedy bags which became the must-have accessory of the decade. In 2023, LV tried to pull off the same trick with a high-profile, global campaign which saw super-sized Kusama animatronics waving maniacally, painting dots over shopfronts across the world. A fitting tribute to the immense and varied legacy of the 95-year-old artist, no doubt. The Los Angeles-based Hauser & Wirth artist Henry Taylor has worked with French fashion brand Études Studio to produce a collection that saw his large-scale acrylic paintings transferred to silk shirts and suede jackets. Earlier this year, the Chicago-born New York-based painter Rashid Johnson, also at Hauser & Wirth, released a bucket hat designed in collaboration with the New York Mets.

These were all done, you have to assume, with the artists’ knowledge and consent: they knew what they were getting into and they got a fat cheque out of it. But it’s different when the artists are dead and it’s their estates which are organising the collaborations. With the artist out of the picture, all sorts of questions are raised: Who’s in control? Why are they doing them? Are they diluting great art? Are they respecting the artist’s legacy? And what do fashion critics think? Are the ‘collaborations’ even good? Have they perhaps gone too far?

Typically, collaborations come about through the estate partnering with image licensing companies. For example, the Warhol Foundation partners with three of the major companies: in the US, you have the Artists Rights Society and Artestar (the company that also represents the Basquiat and Haring estates, besides numerous living artists), in the UK, the big company is the Design and Artists Copyright Society, aka DACS. These exist to make sure artists are fairly compensated and their legal rights and copyrights are protected. They also help draw up contracts for licensing out work – DACS will take a minimum of 10% retail value of any merchandise featuring a licensed image. In 2022, DACS secured a total of £1.4 million through its licensing service. It’s an income stream for estates that might otherwise be financially challenged. Not every artist sells well or has a stock of valuable works to draw on.

But the motivation isn’t always money. Often, it’s a combination of genuine respect for the art, and the presumption that the artist would want their work to be seen more widely – that’s the goal of all art isn’t it?

Genuine respect was the foundation for one of the most striking and recognisable creative collaborations of recent years – the spring 2017 Robert Mapplethorpe × Raf Simons collection. More than 70 of the New York photographer’s black and white works were printed on shirts, tank tops and aprons. Michael Ward Stout, president of the Mapplethorpe Foundation for the past 35 years, the artist’s lifetime lawyer and close friend, told me that the collaboration began when the foundation heard that Simons was a significant collector of Mapplethorpe’s work. The deal was brokered by Artestar. The benefit the foundation saw in collaboration was, “presenting the artist’s works to a broader public, and in this case, to the world of high fashion.”… “In the case of a deceased artist, it keeps the work alive and expands the artist’s legacy.”

A similar motivation lay behind the 2022 collaboration between the estate of Larry Stanton and Acne Studios. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Stanton was known for his pencil and oil portraits of young gay men in New York’s Greenwich Village. The collaboration saw the creation of a capsule collection “Acne Studios Loves Larry Stanton” and the temporary exhibition of Stanton’s works in Acne stores. Fabio Chertisch, director of the estate, says that the interest in a collaboration came first from Thomas Perrson, then editor-in-chief of Acne Paper, “He was captivated by Larry Stanton’s work and my story when he visited my art collection in Milan,” Chertisch says. This was soon followed by the suggestion by founder and creative director Jonny Johansson that the estate collaborate with their design office.

From the estate’s perspective, “The primary goal for us is to make Larry Stanton’s work accessible and visible… Additionally, Acne Studios produced beautiful videos documenting the exhibitions and the people involved, preserving the memory of this experience.” Chertisch insisted that the proceeds of the capsule sale went entirely to Visual AIDS, a New York arts organisation that raises AIDS awareness through art. The estate holds no copyright over the clothing, but does on the graphics and images of Larry Stanton included in the collection. The Stanton estate received royalties from the use of Stanton’s images for advertising and promotional purposes. “They gave a beautiful gift to Larry’s memory,” he says.

Richard Villani, creative director of the Tom of Finland Foundation, says they’re in their third year of collaborating with clothing brand Diesel. This was first sparked by Diesel’s sponsorship of the Tom of Finland Foundation’s 2022 exhibition ‘AllTogether’ – the link between the Italian clothing brand, known for its heavy use of denim and leather, and Tom of Finland’s masc, muscle-bound bikers and lumberjacks is pretty obvious – and the clothing collaborations started when Diesel’s creative director Glenn Martins discovered the foundation’s wider archive of erotic imagery.

In any collaboration, compromises have to be made. Transferring art between media – from oil paintings or silver nitrate prints to waterproof fabric inks – introduces minor but noticeable differences. Fabrics can’t ever perfectly reproduce original artworks, images have to be adapted: colour, stretch, feel, all have to be taken into account. The quality of the final product reflects on the artist, and few want to look cheap. The collaboration might bring greater exposure to the artist’s work, but there’s always going to be the question of how true to the artist’s life and work the result is.

Villani is aware of the challenges. “With any brand we work with they lead the creative and our job is to make sure it stays true to the Tom of Finland brand and imagery. The art work chosen is typically chosen by the designer or brand. We may offer suggestions but ideally it comes to what their wants and needs are.” It’s a particularly important issue in the case of erotic and explicit artists such as Tom of Finland. Villani says the Foundation is used to navigating the ethics and legality of putting erotic art on clothes, online, and in the press. “We are always thoughtful about how the erotic material is being used and presented. With each brand we work with it’s more about their boundaries and limitations. What can they legally put on clothing or products? It would be great to not censor art, but particularly erotic art.”

Chertisch was also closely involved with the production to ensure Stanton’s work was respected: “The work was always carried out in dialogue with me, without delving into the technical details of the garments—naturally. I initially selected the images, which were then finalised by the brand’s creative director in constant dialogue to avoid, for instance, distorting the original images. Some minor modifications were made to the backgrounds for printing purposes, with the estate’s approval.”

But what does the fashion world make of these collaborations? I asked a number of writers for their perspectives. Harriet Quick, contributing editor at HTSI, saw a lot of positives in the trend. “[Collaboration] has, particularly in the last ten years, really become a driving force and energy within fashion, within luxury. I think that really on a broader scale, it reflects the huge interest and appetite for the arts, for exhibitions, for immersive experiences, for unleashing the power of art to communicate, and quite frequently is landing up on a T-shirt as a kind of souvenir.” She notes that museums and institutional shops “used to be a pretty poor place for shopping. They would have just a head scarf and a tote bag. I think it’s really interesting that the more innovative institutions have put a lot of energy into trying to improve that museum shop offer. I think that particularly the Met and the British Museum have been doing some really, really nice, desirable things.”

Art and fashion writer Rosalind Jana offered her thoughts on why brands are keen to align themselves with these artists. “Fashion often asserts its own credibility or seriousness by claiming that it’s a form of artistry – a claim that is obviously easier to sustain in the realms of haute couture or conceptual design than high street labels. But putting an artist’s work on a T-shirt is still a great shortcut to cultural substance. Basically, we’re in this odd time where various art forms have acquired heightened status as part of larger brand-building exercises (see also: celebrity book clubs, A24 merch, Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, the Fondation Louis Vuitton etc). A fashion label, of any stripe, no longer just wants to be a label. It wants to be a lifestyle, an expression of good taste and creativity and thoughtful values ready to be consumed by those willing to buy into it.”

Aleks Cvetkovic, partner and strategy director at London-based creative agency, Birch, and frequent contributor to men’s fashion mags, said he’s “sceptical” of collaborations, particularly those created through artists’ estates. “Few that I’ve seen are executed in an inspiring or unexpected way, or in a way that feels true to the late artist.” Cvetkovic sees it as the inevitable result of social media and ‘digital hype culture’. “Brands are keen to align with fine art because it signals cultural influence and worldliness. It’s happening in the hospitality space too. Signalling an understanding or appreciation of fine art suggests that a brand is ‘cultured’, and it’s a natural human instinct to want to feel that we, as consumers, are cultured in turn. Fashion × fine art collaborations are an easy way for brands to do this and I take the view that most consumers don’t interrogate these collaborations enough. Sadly, we live in an age where a quick flick through Instagram and a ‘wow, that looks cool’ is justification enough in itself to buy something mediocre. There are exceptions of course, but the majority of these collaborations don’t reflect well on brands or consumers.”

The noted fashion writer and commentator Derek Guy, AKA Twitter’s Menswear Guy, was characteristically direct and cutting. “To be honest, I find the Basquiat stuff kind of absurd, as I can’t imagine Basquiat would ever want this work on fast fashion clothes.”

You have to draw a line between the kinds of collaborations undertaken by the estates and brands I spoke to – deeply personal, showing care and consideration about upholding an artists’ legacy while broadening their reach – and the others, who seem happy with simply printing an old graffiti tag on a cheap tee and calling it a day. Sadly, and not without trying, I wasn’t able to find any of these latter businesses that were willing to talk to me about their business. It leaves me wondering: are the estates acting in the best interest of the dead artists when they turn their work into intellectual property? By plastering merch with their motifs, are they allowing their work to be understood as an expression of the artist’s life, knowledge and creativity – are they building their legacy – or are they just building up their bank balance?