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On Friday, Porsche held an exclusive party on a West Hollywood rooftop to celebrate the launch of not a new car, but a suitcase.

The €2,250 ($2,453) case was designed in partnership with German premium luggage brand Rimowa — featuring the company’s signature grooved aluminium design — to pay homage to the storied Porsche 911 sports car, multiple of which filled the venue Friday night, exhibiting the luggage inside their trunks. Attracting a young crowd, the launch also featured five spy thriller-style short films screened at the party that highlighted the collaborative efforts of the two brands.

The Porsche-Rimowa suitcase joins a long list of recent streetwear-influenced collaborations between carmakers and fashion labels, including a new Maybach car designed by the late Virgil Abloh unveiled last week, a Maserati clothing range created with Japanese designer Hiroshi Fujiwara, and a partnership between skateboarding label Palace and Mercedes-AMG. The latter tie-up includes a full clothing range and four special edition cars. Mercedes, an increasingly frequent fashion collaborator, also partnered with streetwear labels Heron Preston and Off-White last year.

The motorsports industry as a whole is looking to align itself with fashion. Racing competition Formula 1 has used streetwear collaborations with brands like Bape to shake off the sport’s stuffy and elitist reputation, marketing itself to a young and fashion-savvy Gen-Z audience.

By teaming up, fashion groups and carmakers not only reach new, affluent consumers but also place novel product categories in front of their most avid fans. It’s not just about selling more cars or creating a new revenue stream. Fashion companies benefit from the association of prestige automakers. Similar to how skateboarding and hip-hop have influenced the menswear market, the culture around performance cars is also creating aspirational markers in fashion.

All the while, companies like Maybach-owner Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar covet visibility among young, stylish consumers who may not ever purchase a $200,000 vehicle but might one day purchase a car branded hoodie if the brand has successfully been marketed as cool.

Similarly, The new Porsche-Rimowa suitcase will reach younger customers who may not own a Porsche, said Deniz Keskin, the company’s head of brand management and partnerships, “but it gives them a chance to enter the brand’s world.”

A More Refined Approach

Tie-ups between carmakers and fashion brands are nothing new. British menswear label Hackett has worked with Aston Martin for almost 20 years. The relationship began when Aston Martin requested to have their Formula 1 drivers’ clothing sponsored by the brand, but it has evolved into a more collaborative partnership in recent years. Today, the companies’ respective design teams work side-by-side on Hackett’s Aston Martin-branded polos and puffer vests, according to Mark Blenkinsop, chief marketing officer of AWWG, Hackett’s parent company.

This deeper level of collaboration is indicative of a wider trend, where licensing deals and logo swaps aren’t enough to pique the interest — and wallets — of consumers. Today, the working relationship between auto companies and fashion brands is far more elaborate, highlighting an alignment between their respective products and target audiences. Rimowa and Porsche hone in on their mutual status as German premium design brands, while Maserati’s collaboration with Zegna in 2020 was rooted in their “mutual passion for ‘Made in Italy,’” the brands said at the time.

Nowadays, such collaborations are reaching more discerning consumers, according to Walter D’Aprile, founder of Nss Factory, a Milan-based creative agency. For instance, Gucci’s 2011 collaboration with Fiat simply featured its classic green and red stripes on a special edition Fiat 500 car — a tie-up that wouldn’t fly today, D’Aprile said.

Today, a collaboration requires creating a narrative that explains why it makes sense in the first place. The Palace-Mercedes collaboration was popular with consumers because the colourful, stylish workwear and matching one-of-a-kind art cars designed for the launch reflected Palace’s reputation for daring collaborations that take fashion into new arenas across sport and lifestyle.

“We refuse a lot of brand collabs related to cars,” said Arthur Kar, owner of the L’Art De L’Automobile luxury car dealership that works at the growing intersection of fashion and high-end automobiles and has collaborated with the likes of Porsche and Dover Street Market.

“It’s not because we don’t respect the brands approaching us,” Kar said. “But we only collaborate where there is a genuine story to tell or an experience we can create that makes sense for us.”

Formula 1′s Fashion Icons

Following the footsteps of the NBA and the Premier League, racing competition Formula 1 is becoming a fashion marketing arena in its own right as some of its athletes have become style icons, including Lewis Hamilton and Guanyu Zhou, the first Chinese driver to race in the competition.

Zhou is often pictured pre-race in full Prada looks and is an ambassador for luxury watchmaker Hublot, while Hamilton arrives wearing eye-catching looks from Bottega Veneta, Jacquemus and Ahluwalia, sharing content with his 27.5 million Instagram followers. For brands, each race day creates valuable product placement opportunities. The sport’s rising popularity among young people in North America has led to partnerships like the Tommy Hilfiger-Lewis Hamilton fashion line, which launched in 2018.

Ferrari, which runs its own Formula 1 team, debuted at Milan Fashion Week in February, presenting its second ready-to-wear collection as part of its efforts in building a fully-fledged fashion line.

The pieces, including a $1,750 recycled nylon jacket in its trademark red and black and a $2,000 leather backpack, incorporate modified fabrics used in Ferrari cars and reference the uniforms of racing drivers and crew members. But they’re not expected to be a significant revenue driver for the company. Instead, the fashion line will help elevate Ferrari’s other licensed products like wallets and gloves.

“Fashion is a great way to reach a bigger audience and make the brand relevant to people’s lifestyle,” Ferrari’s chief brand diversification officer told BoF in June.

When Gucci Westman launched her makeup line, Westman Atelier, in 2018, the conventional wisdom for new brands was that they needed to grow, grow, grow. Anastasia Beverly Hills, Huda Beauty, Morphe and other upstarts used influencer partnerships and frequent product drops to stay out in front of each new trend. They were quickly rewarded with stratospheric sales and hefty private equity investments and came to embody the “Instagram makeup” look that dominated the end of the last decade.

Westman Atelier’s rise has been more of a slow burn. The brand, created by the makeup artist and her husband, Rag & Bone co-founder David Neville, launched with six products, mostly focused on complexion, Westman’s speciality as a makeup artist. The range has expanded to 12 products today, plus brushes, but still doesn’t include a traditional lipstick or an eyeshadow palette, two products that have been significant revenue drivers for countless makeup lines. Instead, Vital Skin, a stick foundation with skin care ingredients that retails for $68, emerged as an early hero product, and bestsellers include blush and highlighter sticks.

The brand hasn’t hit the same heights as its rivals as a result. Westman Atelier is on track to hit $60 to $70 million in sales in 2022, compared with hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the brands started by fellow makeup artists Huda Kattan and Charlotte Tilbury. But that’s changing fast: Westman’s line entered Sephora last year, where sales are “wildly exceeding expectations,” according to Alison Hahn, senior vice president of makeup and fragrance at the retailer. The brand recently doubled its space at Bergdorf Goodman and later this month will open a custom counter at Selfridges in London.

Westman Atelier’s recent success comes as people emerge from the pandemic willing to spend more on makeup. Prestige makeup sales in the US are up 20 percent this year compared to 2021, according to The NPD Group. And while demand for neon eyeshadow or liquid matte lipstick with matching liner comes and goes, the sort of elevated basics Westman sells are a constant in makeup routines.

“Consumers [are] indulging and ‘premium-ising,’” said Larissa Jensen, vice president and industry analyst at The NPD Group.

Westman’s deliberate approach to her brand, from product development to package design, has helped establish her as an authority in those core categories (she is also a well-known name in the beauty world, including previous roles as artistic director at Lancôme and Revlon, and an A-list clientele Gwyneth Paltrow to Jennifer Aniston). Westman Atelier sticks and compacts are mostly matte pastel pink and black or gold, with magnetic caps and mixed metal accents.

Products are sturdy with scrupulous details; they’re almost too heavy and too nice to throw in your purse. They’re fit to be displayed alongside Hermés Beauty’s colour-blocked tubes of lipstick that debuted in September 2020. Westman Atelier is priced just as luxuriously: a lip colour compact costs $85 and a cream highlighter $75.

Product Comes First

Westman Atelier has also only raised $15 million to date from Prelude Growth Partners, which has led all financing rounds since 2018, Imaginary Ventures and Andrew Rosen, who sits on the brand’s board. The brand employs about 60 people, including an in-house chemist, and opened its own lab in New Jersey last summer.

Westman has never relied on influencer partnerships (the brand doesn’t pay content creators but gifts new releases) or product collaborations. Nor does she follow a launch calendar; her products come out when they’re ready.

“On the one hand, it’s not a drop-heavy business, it’s not a newness, newness, newness business,” said Nick Brown, co-founder and partner of Imaginary Ventures. ”But on the other hand, they do launch new palettes, new products — and when they do, the customer goes crazy.”

Westman held up the release of a new pressed setting powder for a year because she was unable to source an ingredient (it now comes out in May). A second foundation will finally come out in later summer, which Westman and Neville say is the brand’s biggest launch to date.

“It’s lighter than the stick,” she explained. “It’s easy-going, like if you just want your skin to look like you just had a quick facial.”

Like Vital Skin, the new liquid formula is “super active [ingredient] heavy,” according to Westman.

Westman Atelier’s minimalist approach to its products hasn’t always served it well. After its launch, about 18 months after Fenty Beauty made 40 shades of foundation the new benchmark, the brand was criticised for offering only 11 shades. Since then, the line has nearly doubled its shade range (and will hopefully expand it further).

Retail Strategy

A small retail presence prior to 2021 — the brand was carried at places like Credo Beauty, Violet Grey and Barneys New York, until it closed — benefited the brand during the pandemic. Consumers were hesitant to shop for beauty at speciality retailers, which comprise the majority of sales for many beauty brands, while many stopped wearing makeup altogether.

“It was an incubation period where we were fortunate to really buck the colour makeup trends,” Neville said.

Even the brand’s Sephora launch was conservative, with products listed on the retailer’s website and available in 38 locations. A wider rollout is planned for 2023.

Westman Atelier’s prices are higher. Vital Skin, for example, costs 40 to 70 percent more than Nars’ $40 to $49 foundations and stores have to make space for the brand’s entire range.

A “trio of pillars” differentiates Westman Atelier from other makeup labels in the store. “One is luxury, one is artistry and one is clean,” said Sephora’s Hahn. “When we looked at our portfolio at the time, there was not one brand that had that trio.”

The brand’s Sephora sales in 2021 were more than double initial projections, according to Neville. “We did what they [Sephora] projected us to do the full year in the first four months,” he said.

Sephora adopted a similar strategy with Pat McGrath Labs, another premium makeup artist-founded label that initially launched in just 29 stores in 2017 (166 today). Bolder products that focus on eye and lip differ from Westman’s minimalist aesthetic and complexion-driven range, but both lines have that luxury positioning in-store. McGrath’s pigmented eye shadow palettes cost $125 each.

“Sephora had such a focus on this ‘cool, hip’ colour stuff that there was an opening for this new, prestige brand that was offering just really effective basics,” said Michelle Kluz, a partner at Kearney, a global consultancy.

Luxury basics, of course.