Niche music platforms and fashion brands are teaming up for online and offline activations. Earlier this month, music platform Colors — known for its emerging artist discovery — unveiled its latest fashion tie-up, a collaboration with Adidas Originals. The brand teamed up with Colors to celebrate the launch of its latest Adidas Club Originals campaign with a video series featuring European artists. As part of the series, Adidas Originals hosted and dressed emerging artists on the Colors stage: Palestinian-French-Algerian and Serbian artist Saint Levant; London-based rapper, producer and songwriter Berwyn; Geneva-based artist Varnish La Piscine; the series will conclude with German artist Amilli.
“Colors has a rich history in showcasing exceptional, rising talent from across the globe through their musical talents,” says Chris Mitchell, VP at Adidas Europe. He adds that this aligned with the foundations of Adidas’s Club Originals campaign, which centred around celebrating creativity in all its forms — music, art, style and movement. “The two brands are linked by their commitment to fostering community and culture, providing a platform for self-expression and creativity. Our aim with the Club Originals campaign was to inspire our audience across music, art, style and movement and to encourage them to get thinking about the future of those sectors.”
In April, Ralph Lauren teamed up with Poolsuite, the Web3 community and internet radio station formerly known as Poolside FM, to tap into their NFT community and align the brand with the Miami lifestyle. And in April, Christopher Kane’s More Joy partnered with Glyn Fussell, founder of Sink the Pink LGBTQ+ collective and club night, and Bugged Out, an underground club night ad platform.
“Our vision for More Joy has always been that it goes beyond selling products,” says Tammy Kane, co-founder and co-creative director at Christopher Kane. “The partnership aspect is key; we know fashion, but we don’t know the music industry.” Some 1,500 tickets were sold for the inaugural More Love Disco club night, which took place at KOKO in Camden in north-west London.
With these collabs comes cultural cachet and access to engaged communities of loyal fans. Colors, which launched in 2017, has a following of nearly 7 million on YouTube and over 1.3 million followers on Instagram, and its videos are known for going viral across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. NTS has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and over 3.3 unique monthly listeners and 260,000 annual attendees to NTS events.