Creative Collaboration:
Dior Men x Yoshitomo Nara
2020 Fashion Scholarship Fund Case Study: In this year’s case, you will research and develop a plan for either the design, merchandising, analytics or supply chain component of a creative collaboration between a fashion apparel (men’s, women’s, kids, or gender neutral), accessories, footwear, home or beauty retailer or brand and a collaborator that is not currently in the fashion apparel (men’s, women’s, kids, or gender neutral), accessories, footwear, home or beauty business. Recent examples of such collaborations include Dolce & Gabbana x SMEG, Calvin Klein and the Warhol Foundation, and the adidas x Parley collection. The fashion apparel (men’s, women’s, kids, or gender neutral), accessories, footwear, home or beauty retailer/brand must be publicly traded. The collaborator must be another company, an individual, or an institution, with its primary affiliations and activities focused outside of the fashion industry.
The New Luxury
Collectively, Millennials and Generation Z will represent 45% of the overall luxury goods market by 2025, while these generations combined resulted in 85% of all luxury growth in 2017. Younger luxury consumers are more diverse, and the financial and cultural power of hip-hop and streetwear keeps growing. In effect, luxury brands are reinterpreting streetwear and collaborating with streetwear brands and artists to appeal to younger consumers. Consumers today view “old luxury” as a term that has connotations of elitism and exclusivity. Once strictly tethered to price, craftsmanship, and traditional notions of affluence, luxury today is more dynamic than just the acquisition of expensive items that serve as status symbols. While coolness in the industry is unquantifiable, a term that comes close is “cultural currency”, or a knowledge that creates a perception around a product that elevates it beyond the reductive notions of cost and quality. Once solely indicative of a shared status, material goods now convey shared values. Smart brands in the industry see the value in creating an environment that celebrates artists with whom they collaborate and share a creative vision. In a way, youth fashion consumption more resembles art than commerce. As a result, collaboration culture, particularly between traditional luxury brands and unlikely counterparts, have been an industry driver in this new era of luxury.
Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist best known for his paintings of children and animals that appear simultaneously sweet and sinister. A contemporary of Takashi Murakami, Nara has been influenced by popular culture in both Eastern and Western society. His art explores themes of isolation, rebellion, and spirituality under the influence of neo-expressionism and punk rock. His most well known subject is a young girl with piercing eyes, who brandishes knives, crucifixes and flaming torches, or sports vampire fangs and smokes cigarettes. Subverting the imagery of manga and anime, Nara infuses his works with horror-like imagery. The figures in his work are born out of deep introspection and his layering and erasure of colors on the canvas; only the most sincere elements are allowed to remain. Nara’s bizarrely intriguing works have gained him a worldwide cult following, with his works often selling for millions.
Dior Men
In 2017, the New York Times reported that Dior holds 41% of the share capital and 56.9% of voting rights within the LVMH conglomerate. Prior to taking charge as the new artistic director of Dior Homme in 2018, Kim Jones worked at Louis Vuitton as their menswear designer for seven years, bringing his love and knowledge of high-end streetwear to a traditional luxury brand that had been until then, overly content to sell to its male consumers little more than suitcases, belts, and monogrammed wallets. So when Dior Homme became stuck in a rut of producing black skinny suits under the longstanding direction of Hedi Slimane, Jones was the obvious choice to revitalize the brand. The course correction at Dior Homme which Jones has since renamed “Dior Men” has been swift and unmistakable. The shift in style and sensibility is evident in the label’s iconic bee emblem, reimagined by contemporary pop artist KAWS. Since joining Dior, Jones has collaborated with a different artist for each of his Dior collections, starting with KAWS and Hajime Sorayama.
Kim Jones
Kim Jones has been invested in counterculture and the fashion that accompanies it since discovering designers such as Vivienne Westwood during his youth in 1990s London. Jone’s penchant for integrating streetwear and subculture into runway-worthy garments has always shone through since early in his career. Jones was at the helm of men’s ready to wear and accessories at Louis Vuitton as Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collapsed the remnants of a divide between fashion and art. Additionally, he spearheaded the Louis Vuitton x Supreme collaboration that shook the entire industry. According to Jones, “Mr. Dior, is the pinnacle of a designer. He was a gallerist who worked with Picasso, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and a lot of artists who were famous while alive. I want to do that for the digital generation.”
The Collaboration
A collaboration between Dior and Yoshitomo Nara would be remarkably representative of Dior’s shifting direction and embrace of newness under Kim Jones. Similar to Jones, Nara grew up in an era of post-war globalization and found his niche in punk rock and other counterculture scenes. To this day, both Jones and Nara are heavily influenced by their punk rock subculture roots. As one of the central figures of the Japanese neo-Pop movement, Nara’s work expresses the struggle to find an identity fractured by war, rapid modernization, and an omnipresent visual culture. An appeal to the pathos is pervasive in his works which are as sardonic as they are poignant. New luxury consumers who value honesty, inclusivity, and democracy over elitism, are sure to connect with the themes of loneliness and rebellion that characterize Nara’s works. Millennial and Generation Z new luxury consumers who grew up and were born into the digital world, will be able to instantly recognize Nara’s depicted feelings of isolation caused by a hyper-networked society. A collaboration between a 72-year old traditional luxury French fashion house and a Japanese contemporary pop artist rooted in counterculture may have seemed unlikely decades ago, but in the shifting paradigm of new luxury, it only makes sense.
Target Customer
The Dior x Yoshitomo Nara target customer is an early 20s to early 30s branding specialist at a media company. His job often crosses over into the fashion industry. He lives in New York City and travels for work to other major cities around the world, a few times a year. He is independent, lives far from home and has a core group of friends. He has a Bachelor’s degree. In his free time, he works on his own art and creative endeavors. He is interested in the fine arts, photography, music, and film. He is an avid skateboarder and is well-versed in street culture. Most significantly, he is in tune with trends in the fashion world and popular culture.
Product Concept
The Dior x Yoshitomo Nara collection will include a tote bag, a shirt, a jumper (sweatshirt), a t-shirt, and a pair of trousers. There will be two variations of each piece with ten pieces in total. The collaboration will include one of each of the staples of current menswear. Some of the pieces such as the Tote Bag, Jumper, and Tee are gender-neutral and can also be worn by women. It will not be a shared product collaboration between both brands. Dior will collaborate with Yoshitomo Nara to design an assortment of ready-to-wear that will feature the artist’s graphics.
Pricing Strategy
Each piece from this collaboration is priced in accordance with the prices Dior has set for similar pieces in recent collaborations with KAWS and Hajime Sorayama. The prices are what the target customer would expect from a coveted luxury brand. Collaboration pieces tend to be priced higher than similar pieces that are not part of a special collection. As a top-level luxury brand, Dior is priced higher than brands such as Saint Laurent, Maison Margiela, and Prada. They are on par with Gucci and priced slightly lower than Louis Vuitton, the highest selling brand within the LVMH conglomerate and one of Dior’s biggest competitors.
Debut / Dover Street Market
The collection will debut at Dior Men’s Pre-Fall 2020 fashion show. The show will take place in December 2019. The collection will then drop in April 2020 and be available for purchase. The collaboration will sell on Dior’s e-commerce platform and exclusively in-store at the six Dover Street Market locations— London, Ginza, New York, Singapore, Beijing, and Los Angeles.
Dover Street Market is a multi-brand retailer founded by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and her husband Adrian Joffe. DSM is a department store that carries both luxury fashion and high-end streetwear. Brands include Balenciaga, Gucci, Prada, Rick Owens, Burberry, Ambush, Eckhaus Latta, Jacquemus, JW Anderson, Maison Margiela, Raf Simons, Vetements, Y/Project, Alyx, Dries Van Noten, and Undercover, etc.
Dior has partnered with DSM previously with their 2015 residency at DSM London and their recent residency at DSM Beijing which features their F/W 19 Dior Men’s collection. Historically, Dior has seldom sold their ready-to-wear products at retailers other than Dior flagships and Dior online. Especially under the creative direction of Kim Jones who has already taken the initiative to adapt Dior Men to a changing luxury market, retailing their ready-to-wear clothing from an outside platform would further their progression as a brand and also cement their standing within “new luxury” by attracting the new luxury consumer base of DSM.
Distribution Strategy
Dior x Yoshitomo Nara will launch exclusively at the six Dover Street Market locations around the world. The artist himself will attend and speak at the Ginza launch in Tokyo. Prior to the drop, Dover Street Market and Dior will post promotional photos of the collaboration with the date of the drop stamped across, on their Instagram accounts. An exclusive brick-and-mortar launch still adheres to Dior’s traditional path of exclusivity and rarity. However, launching at all six DSM locations instead of just one, will be a first for Dior, expanding their consumer reach.
After two weeks, the collaboration will be available for purchase on Dior’s online e-commerce platform to widen their consumer base to include people who do not live in cities where DSM is located. However, it still will not be available at Dior brick-and-mortar stores and will only be exclusively sold in person at DSM locations. By partnering with DSM, Dior will engage with the contemporary retail landscape. The changing luxury market has shown that heritage is not enough to influence consumers into purchasing. The new luxury consumer desires innovation and a departure from tradition.
Planning
The highest sales months for the clothing industry occur in quarter 2 and quarter 4 due to warm weather in spring and the beginning of summer in quarter 2, and the holiday shopping season in quarter 4. This is indicated in the sales data from the United States Census Bureau. The Dior x Yoshitomo Nara collection is scheduled to launch in Pre-Fall 2020. The fashion show unveiling the collection will occur in December 2019 and the collection will be available for retail in the months of April 2020 - September 2020. April - June will make up Quarter 2 and July - September will make up Quarter 3.
The expected inventory turnover ratio is estimated to be 1.34, which was the inventory turnover ratio of Christian Dior group in 2018. After examining the average markup in the luxury market, the estimated markup from cost of goods sold will be approximately 300% for all pieces.
Marketing
To ensure profitability, Dior should consider reaching outside of the niche market of the collaboration to target a wider consumer group. This is possible through increased advertising through influencer marketing and celebrity branding and endorsement of the collaboration.
One principal challenge of the Dior x Yoshitomo Nara collaboration is the niche market that it targets. Yoshitomo Nara is a world-renowned artist whose works often go for millions, but his name is not as instantly recognizable internationally as for example, Andy Warhol or Keith Haring. Therefore, consumers outside of the target market, who are not familiar with Nara’s name may not be inclined to purchase from the collaboration. One way to tackle this obstacle would be to utilize celebrity endorsement of the collaboration through advertisements of celebrities or high-profile models carrying the product. This has been historically exemplified in Takashi Murakami’s design of Kanye West’s Graduation album cover. The collaboration between Murakami and West immensely increased Murakami’s icon status, and in turn drove up sales for the ongoing Louis Vuitton x Murakami collaboration.
Scaling Proposals
In the case of a well-received fashion show unveiling and a lucrative drop at Dover Street Market and Dior Online, there are several potential plans for scaling the collaboration between Dior and Yoshitomo Nara.
Although expanding product assortment would almost certainly drive up sales for Dior, the luxury fashion house thrives on exclusivity and unattainability. To expand the product assortment would diminish the rarity of Dior x Yoshitomo Nara products. Therefore, a compelling approach to scaling would be to not expand the product assortment, but rather capitalize on the scarcity of the collaboration.
If the collaboration is successful enough, Dior will be able to cement the collaboration as iconic and enduring in the minds of consumers. One potential venture would be to create a coffee-table book that details how the collaboration between Kim Jones of Dior and Yoshitomo Nara came to be, including interviews with both men, sketches of the design process, full-page spreads of Nara’s works, and in depth considerations of each piece included in the collection. The collaboration will partner with renowned institutions where Nara’s works have been previously or are presently displayed, to retail them in their Museum Store. Institutions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan (Artnet Worldwide, 2019). This venture would allow Dior to further promote the “rare” status of the collaboration, while also still gaining sales post-collaboration.
Written by Lily Yu, July 2019