Luxury fashion brands are financing Hollywood projects – and becoming more visible onscreen | Canada Voices

Is it a luxury fashion house or a Hollywood studio? These days, it’s a little bit of both.

The relationship between fashion and film is growing closer, as luxury brands move into the entertainment business. It’s hard to choose between dismay and admiration when it comes to the increasingly blurred line between marketing and costume.

In the third and final season of HBO’s Euphoria, Jacob Elordi’s character, Nate, wears a $8,780 leather shirt from Bottega Veneta, and the trailer similarly showcases him in the label’s knit polos. The Oscar-nominated actor has been a brand ambassador for the Italian luxury house since 2024, but in the show, Nate is a recent high school grad who’s taken over his dad’s construction business. In fact, he is at pains to remind his fiancée that they’re on a budget.

At Paris Fashion Week this past March, Balenciaga promoted a runway collaboration with Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, cannily timed ahead of the season premiere.

French multinational Kering, which owns Bottega, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent, notably took a majority stake in Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency in 2023 and formed a Saint Laurent Productions division. Its inaugural production was Pedro Almodóvar’s short film Strange Way of Life. It’s a formalized step beyond designer Yves Saint Laurent contributing to Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe for Belle de Jour and The Hunger in the 1960s and 80s.

Is it movie marketing, arts patronage or cultural advertising? Welcome to a murky world where creativity and product placement collide. When you follow the money, it leads to fashion brands – and questions of autonomy and authenticity in filmmaking.

Saint Laurent Productions went on to underwrite The Shrouds, David Cronenberg’s sci-fi drama about a bereaved tech mogul (Vincent Cassel), who is sharply garbed in the brand. Star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley also wore the label to the movie’s Cannes premiere. The Hollywood Reporter pointed out in its review that Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello “takes credit for the clothes design, as well as a producer’s credit, which may explain why (the film) sometimes feels like a very weird product placement exercise.” Although Canadian Anne Dixon is the costume designer on The Shrouds, the movie credits list Vaccarello as “costume artistic director.”

The brand also worked with costumer Catherine George on Jim Jarmusch’s recent Father Mother Sister Brother, creating all of the pieces seen on the characters, from biker jackets to a hoodie.

The interplay of fashion brands and celebrities onscreen isn’t new: The practice dates back more than a century to the earliest days of Hollywood. Couturiers have long supplied wardrobes for stars with whom they have an off-screen relationship. British designer Lucile dressed Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford on and off-screen, as did Paul Poiret with Sarah Bernhardt, and perhaps most famously, Hubert de Givenchy with Audrey Hepburn. In the 1980s, Richard Gere’s Giorgio Armani-clad gigolo made both the fortunes of both the actor and the designer.

But now, more luxury fashion brands are infiltrating the screen wardrobes of projects they’re financing. Through its entertainment arm, Lacoste co-produced French filmmaker Cédric Jimenez’s Chien 51 and has several obvious product placements in the movie, such as a bomber jacket bearing the brand’s oversized signature crocodile.

Archival jewellery creations are among the 27 Tiffany & Co. pieces that Kate Hawley assembled in her Oscar-winning designs for Frankenstein. Dior’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, designed costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, Queer and upcoming film Artificial. The parent company of both brands, LVMH, recently launched its own entertainment division, signalling that it’s just as interested in storytelling as brand opportunities.

Chanel is another brand that’s behind the scenes on movies such as Priscilla, Wuthering Heights and How to Make a Killing. In the latter, Margaret Qualley, who has been a Chanel brand ambassador for years, conspicuously wears the label head-to-toe in every scene. Even if it may have made sense for the role, it was distracting. Costume is integral to character development and shouldn’t be beholden to brand promotion.

Today, the two industries aren’t just entwined, they depend on one another for survival. The promotional partnership between The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Vogue is a striking case study.

The attention hasn’t been on Molly Rogers’s costume design or the high-fashion in the movie but on its cheap merch and the style of the promotional runway. The film’s producer, 20th Century Studios is sending out look-books parsing the stars’ press tour fashion, and sister company Disney+ is livestreaming its Lincoln Center premiere’s red carpet, touted to subscribers as a “can’t-miss, high-fashion world premiere … an exclusive front-row seat to one of the most glamorous nights of the year.” It’s the sort of breathless hyperbole usually reserved for the Met Gala.

The chief orchestrator of that event is Anna Wintour herself, and if there are similarities between the gala’s marketing and the promotional push for The Devil Wears Prada 2, it’s because the head of Vogue is now all-in on the 2006 movie’s joke. It’s a curious but seemingly inevitable development, considering that the film is based on a novel by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger.

Until now, Wintour had never directly acknowledged or engaged with it, preferring to remain coy. (That wink of acknowledgement from behind her sunglasses was, frankly, more chic). Memes have turned Wintour’s villainous alter ego into a folk hero.

But for all of the viral cerulean blue speech clips, the supreme authority of legacy fashion media brands such as Vogue is less assured in today’s fragmented attention economy. (Publisher Condé Nast just shuttered Self and some editions of Glamour). Wintour presenting alongside Anne Hathaway at the Oscars was one thing, but the reveal of Vogue’s new cover featuring Wintour alongside Meryl Streep cemented the magazine’s capitulation.

With celebrity and red carpet fashion dominating pop culture, it seems even Vogue has no other choice but to go mass-market to stake its cultural relevance.

Luxury fashion onscreen and behind the budget is indicative of the economic realities of entertainment and of an industry looking for new ways to expand its cultural capital.