Swiss luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet is set to renew its longstanding ties to American pop culture with the release of a watch collaboration with hip-hop star Travis Scott and his label Cactus Jack Records.

In partnership with Scott, Audemars Piguet will release a limited-edition version of its Royal Oak watch Friday in a new ceramic, as well as putting out a capsule collection of co-branded merchandise from the Swiss watchmaking house and Cactus Jack.

The new watch will be formally unveiled at an event in New York this evening and will feature a number of motifs from Scott’s Cactus Jack label, including a moon phase decorated with a luminous version of the hip brand’s logo — a smiley face with its mouth sewn shut.

“Travis could raise an army,” said Audemars Piguet’s chief executive François-Henri Bennahmias in an exclusive interview with The Business of Fashion. “He’s got such a power. People follow him in a major way.”

Scott, 32, is one of the most successful hip-hop artists of his generation. His fourth studio album Utopia, released in July, had more than 650 million global streams in its opening week, making it the most commercially successful hip-hop album of the year.

The collaboration is likely to be remembered not just for a wristwatch co-designed by Scott, but for the collection of hoodies, T-shirts, jackets, pyjamas, shorts and caps sold through Scott’s own e-commerce platform.

“People will go nuts when they know that AP and Travis have made merch together,” said Bennahmias. “It breaks pretty much every code. Is it going to be successful? We could have multiplied the quantity by at least 10 times and still been successful.”

Audemars Piguet, Bennahmias said, would make “zero” profit from the clothes and accessories, which instead would fund the Cactus Jack Foundation, which grants scholarships to disadvantaged young people.

The collaboration will also be remembered as François-Henri Bennahmias’s swan-song before he retires from the role of Audemars Piguet’s chief executive at the end of this year, a post he took up in 2012 having joined the company almost 30 years ago.

Bennahmias is recognised as one of the watch industry’s most disruptive and influential figures, transforming the family-owned company from a dusty high-end watchmaker into one of the most recognised and in-demand names in luxury.

It was Bennahmias who, while running the company’s US operations, brought it together with Muhammad Ali and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Time To Give auction in the year 2000, and then forged an unlikely alliance to street culture with the Royal Oak Offshore Jay-Z 10th Anniversary in 2005, a watch collab widely considered by industry observers to be a tipping point for the typically conservative Swiss watch industry.

AP has since continued to align itself with popular culture, nurturing high-profile relationships with stars of film, music, sports and the arts, including LeBron James, Kevin Hart and Ed Sheeran, powering rapid sales growth for its watches which have an average price of 42,000 Swiss francs ($47,970).

Bennahmias said he expects Audemars Piguet’s 2023 revenues to grow by around 200,000 Swiss francs to top 2.3 billion Swiss francs ($2.6 billion).

The partnership with Scott might have been announced sooner. In June this year, a Texas grand jury declined criminal charges brought against Scott after 10 people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed in a crush at a festival he founded in 2021. Scott was widely criticised for his response to the Astroworld Festival disaster. Bennahmias declined to comment on the incident, but said that Audemars Piguet had waited until the jury’s decision before activating the collaboration, having first met Scott in 2020 when he was a client.

OXFORDSHIRE, United Kingdom — Wednesday morning at The Business of Fashion’s VOICES 2023 gathering, editor-in-chief Imran Amed and McKinsey senior partner Achim Berg offered a first look at the “The State of Fashion 2024″ report, followed by a series of panels and presentations exploring the forces reshaping the global fashion system.

Speakers including Bottega Veneta creative director Mathieu Blazy, new Gap CEO Richard Dickson and Italian fashion entrepreneur Brunello Cuccinelli discussed craft, culture, brand building and more, while a panel of sustainability stakeholders examined the colonial dynamics embedded in fashion’s climate crisis.

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The State of Fashion 2024

Consumers plan to spend as much as 16 percent less on fashion next year, BoF and McKinsey’s “The State of Fashion 2024″ report found. Berg said this was the latest sign that a softening of the fashion market seen in the second half of 2023 will continue next year.

Opportunities for growth remain, however: notably rebounding travel, which will help brands reach new shoppers with tourist flows expected to hit 110 percent of 2019 levels next year, surpassing pre-pandemic volumes for the first time.

Brunello Cucinelli’s Hopeful AI Vision

In a conversation with BoF’s Imran Amed, Italian fashion entrepreneur Brunello Cucinelli discussed the value of human craftsmanship and his vision of  “humanistic, contemporary capitalism.” “There should be a balance between profit and giving back. Giving back elevates your soul,” Cucinelli said.

After placing ownership of his fast-growing company in a family trust and hiring a pair of co-CEOs to help support his business, Cucinelli has shifted to a creative director role at his namesake brand. He hopes the moves will protect the future of his brand — values intact. “I want my company to be there for another hundred years, and always owned by someone who believes in this sort of contemporary capitalism,” he said.

As wariness mounts regarding the potential for artificial intelligence to disrupt people’s lives and livelihoods, Cucinelli said the young generation should remain optimistic regarding the technology’s potential. “This will be a very helpful tool. It does not show emotion, it doesn’t cry — it will help us to rediscover the value of human beings,” he said. As more and more repetitive work is replaced by artificial intelligence, “we’ll be more on the lookout for thinking human beings, thinking souls.”

“You have to greet the future with a smile,” he concluded.

Facing Climate Colonialism

What is “climate colonialism”? In the run-up to the UN’s COP 28 conference, the phrase fast-entering the sustainability lexicon refers to the way the countries in the Global South often suffer the most from climate change, despite having historically done little to contribute to the problem, while, in a fashion context, being hosts to the network of manufacturers being tasked with retooling supply chains to help address the crisis.

“A lot of the regulation is coming from the EU and the US without sitting down and talking to the communities that have the solutions, talking to the manufacturers and the workers,” Ayesha Barenblat, CEO of supply chain advocacy organisation Remake, said in a panel discussion with BoF’s chief sustainability correspondent Sarah Kent.

Suppliers further down fashion’s value chain — from materials farmers to fabric mills to manufacturers — operate in a highly competitive market with thin margins compared to brands, but are the ones who will need to invest the most to make fashion more sustainable.

“The companies that make the least amount of money on the top line and bottom line have to spend the most money because of how we distribute the responsibility,” said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president for innovation and sustainability at Epic Designers.  “We have to collectively fund decarbonisation,” he said.

Some see colonial dynamics at play at the end of fashion’s lifecycle, too, as poorer countries are forced to deal with the waste the industry produces. In Ghana, a glut of unwanted clothing exported from the West has choked landfills and often ends up washing into sewers, leading heaps of garments to wash up on shore.

Or Foundation founder Sammy Oteng held up a bag containing thousands of tags from just a few hours of cleaning up garments on the beach near Accra.

“Brands are in denial about what’s happening in Ghana. There is a lack of responsibility, because even if we ceased making clothing now, what happens for the decades of damage that’s already been done?” Oteng said. In countries like France, which export massive amounts of used garments, “people are so isolated they don’t ever see what’s going on. Even if you show them a video of what’s going on, maybe they’re shocked but afterwards they go back to their lives.”

Product Passports

One tool that could help hold brands responsible for what happens to their clothes once sold — as well as helping them monetise the secondary market — is the product passport, according to Arianee CEO Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel. “Until a significant part of a brand’s revenue comes from second-hand there’s no possible way to achieve circularity,” he said.

Product passports — which are now being rolled out at scale at many European luxury firms — will generate data about a product’s full life cycle. The technology could create ways for brands to connect with their second-hand customers and develop schemes to charge royalties on secondary-market sales, allowing them to continue funding advertising spend and infrastructure without creating more and more new product.

“This could truly change the revenue model and the cost model. We can change the way we do fashion,” Hurstel said.

Mathieu Blazy’s Creative Alchemy

During two years at the helm of Italian leather goods powerhouse Bottega Veneta, creative director Mathieu Blazy has developed a knack for “alchemy,” BoF’s editor-at-large Tim Blanks pointed out in a talk with the designer.

Creating surprising garments from inspirations as banal as an oxford shirt or jeans — using ultra-realistic trompe-l’œil effects to render those casual sportswear staples in printed leather, for example — has become one of Blazy’s signatures.

“I became obsessed with this idea of boring, universal clothes — thinking, how could we push that? How could we make something for everyday where only the person who wears it knows they are wearing something very special?” Blazy said.

Blazy has captivated fashion fans in recent seasons with shows that featured globe-trotting explorations of texture and craft, juxtaposing a variety of techniques and patterns. In fashion, less can be more, but Blazy has taken another approach. “I wanted to explore more and more. When you add a lot of characters, you add layers and stories and also emotions,” he said.

Textile design is a passion for Blazy, who said he’s increasingly focused on working with teams to make sure design elements are integrated into materials rather than embellishing garments. “There is nothing I love more than when I ask something of the team and they say it’s not possible: then I know it’s going to be a great adventure. That’s when I push and push.”

Young Africa

Lagos Fashion Week founder Omoyemi Akerele spoke with designers Michelle Adepoju and Iretidayo Zaccheaus in a panel spotlighting surging fashion creativity in Africa, particularly in Nigeria where a vibrant scene blends design with influences across cultures and disciplines.

“It’s a melting pot — there are so many young and hungry people in Nigeria, who are really hustlers. There’s so much passion,” Zacchaeus said.

Zacchaeus has attracted as many as 150 brands from across Africa to take part in recent editions of Street Souk, a roving platform for pop-ups, trade fairs and performances that “bridge the gap between the African streetwear community and the global community.”

Gap’s New CEO

Can the man who saved “Barbie” — taking the doll back from the brink of cultural irrelevance to a global marketing phenomenon — now save Gap Inc, another faded icon?

Richard Dickson, who masterminded a turnaround for Mattel and its signature toy, joined the retail giant with a mission to relaunch its troubled apparel brands, which were once front and centre in American culture and dominated the high street.

Like Barbie, “Gap is a pop culture brand that sells apparel,” Dickson told BoF’s Imran Amed, explaining how he was drawing inspiration from the brand’s roots as a destination for blue jeans and records in San Francisco, as well as iconic ad campaigns from the 1990s.

“Brands need to have a strong identity, a point of view and creative perspective. We don’t need everyone to like us,” he said. What that means for Gap remains unclear, but Dickson is examining how the brand can clarify and differentiate its message versus competitors, as well as clarifying the identity of sister labels Old Navy and Banana Republic.

“Every part of a brand needs to be communicated with precision, in stores and online as well as in the company culture,” Dickson said. “It’s never about changing the idea of a brand but translating it into a cultural conversation.”

How Culture Drives Performance

Tim Brown, chief innovation officer at shoemaker Allbirds, interviewed Owen Eastwood, a consultant who has worked to boost the performance of major sports teams as well as private companies by rebooting their cultures. “We found players were often in a chronic stress state, “Eastwood said. “Their experience was: ‘If this goes bad it could ruin my life.’”

Organisations looking to inspire and motivate through means other than fear and stress need participants to foster a sense of belonging.

“[Players] need to connect as individuals to something bigger than themselves,” he explained. “You create a story for them to connect to, and then you need to refresh and retell that story continuously.”

BoF VOICES 2023 is made possible in part by our partners Snapchat, McKinsey & Company, Porsche, Getty Images, Invisible Collection and Soho House.

Fast-fashion retailer Shein has a lot of work to do to convince sceptics that the runway is clear for it to launch an initial public offering next year.

The Singapore-headquartered company filed confidentially for a listing in New York, a person familiar with the matter has said, weeks after Bloomberg News reported that it could seek a valuation of as much as $90 billion in a first-time share sale. If it sold a 10 percent stake, raising about $9 billion at that valuation, it would be the fifth largest consumer company IPO of all time, just behind Porsche AG’s $9.1 billion 2021 listing, Bloomberg calculations show.

To achieve that milestone, Shein will have to do a historic job of persuading sceptical investors, politicians and regulators that the controversies surrounding it aren’t an obstacle to its growth.

The company faces issues including allegations that its products contain cotton from a Chinese region accused of making the material with forced labour, regulatory concern about Chinese firms listing in the US and a bruising legal battle with rival PDD Holdings Inc.’s Temu. Investors will likely have questions about how much of management’s time will be taken up with challenges that aren’t directly related to maintaining the app’s dominance, built on selling clothes for as little as $2.

“One of the biggest disadvantages of an IPO is disclosure and publicity,” David J. Kaufman, co-chair of Thompson Coburn LLP’s corporate and securities practice group, told Bloomberg News. “There’s probably going be a big lobbying effort about why they’re not using forced labour and where they source their cotton, and how all that is changing, with codes of conduct and inspection programmes,” Kaufman said.

Representative Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat from Virginia and one of the most Shein’s most vocal critics, issued a statement Tuesday urging greater scrutiny of Shein’s supply chain ahead of a listing.

“If the fast-fashion giant Shein wants to go public in the US, they should have to prove to American consumers that their products are not sourced from forced labour,” Wexton said in the statement.

Wexton co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a law banning products from China’s Xinjiang region, after a Bloomberg investigation last year found scientific evidence that cotton produced in the region, alleged to be made using forced labour, was present in clothing sold by Shein.

The Congresswoman also co-authored a letter to US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler asking the agency to require Shein to prove its supply chain is free of forced labour before approving any Shein IPO applications.

Shein has a zero-tolerance policy for forced labor and requires its contract manufacturers to only source cotton from approved regions, according to a statement from a company spokesperson responding to Wexton. Only 2.1 percent of Shein’s cotton tested positive for unapproved cotton, the statement showed. The company declined to comment earlier on the confidential filing.

In addition to fighting in the halls of Congress, Shein is also locked in a battle with Temu, an app it competes with for fast-fashion buyers. The duo have sued each other, with Shein accusing Temu of trademark and copyright infringement, while Temu said Shein violated antitrust laws. Shein has said the suit is without merit and the firm will vigorously defend itself.

There have been few Chinese IPOs in the US since a sweeping crackdown on overseas listings that wiped out an estimated $1 trillion of market value. Part of Shein’s long-running campaign to prepare for a US first-time share sale is to position itself as a global company, even though it traces its roots to China.

In 2022, Shein relocated its headquarters to Singapore. Last year, the e-commerce giant also begun to expand its manufacturing facilities in an effort to diversify outside of its Chinese manufacturing base. It has opened distribution centers in the US, Canada and Europe in a bid to accelerate shipping times in those regions. The company bought British online brand Missguided in October, and took a stake in the owner of fashion retailer Forever 21 in August.

Chinese regulators may still decide to scrutinise Shein’s listing and require it to seek approval. The country’s securities watchdog requires Chinese companies to register to sell shares abroad, and screens them for state security and other concerns. That could delay the IPO process further.

Only a trickle of Chinese companies have been allowed to list in the US in recent years, and the offerings have been small. The biggest in the past two years, Hesai Group, raised $192 million on Nasdaq in February.

“Is this a opening of the log jam? Are the glory days back? No. This is a unicorn, it’s a unique example, giant and very valuable,” said Kaufman.

By Olivia Rockeman

Learn more:

Shein Files for US IPO in Major Test for Investor Appetite

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have been hired as lead underwriters on the initial public offering (IPO), and Singapore-based Shein could launch its new share sale some time in 2024, the sources said.