Material World

Helen Hunt wearing an H&M gown on the red carpet at the Oscars on Sunday

On Wednesday H&M is having its first-ever Paris fashion show – in the Musée Rodin, the haute art ex-venue of Tom Ford’s Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano’s Christian Dior. Coming on the back of Sunday’s Oscar moment, when best supporting actress nominee Helen Hunt wore H&M on the red carpet, it seems to indicate more upmarket ambitions for the brand. So, is this a sign of the times or a sign of the decline of western fashion civilisation? Maybe a bit of both.

(Note: it doesn’t seem to be the unveiling of the group’s new, higher-priced brand collection & Other Stories – it’s H&M itself. So it’s not a move to elevate a line to, say, the Martin Sitbon level.)

On one level, it sounds silly. The whole point of great high street brands such as H&M is that it so quickly, effectively and economically translates high-fashion trends for the rest of the world without the frills, hoo-ha and elitism associated with the whole show system, its seating ranks, invitations and exclusionary velvet ropes. It led the revolution to democratise style, and its consumers love it for it.

The point of a fashion show, of course, is other. It is for a designer to communicate a point of view on female identity and where it is going to a group of people who then consider it in the greater context of the industry, and analyse it. And it is famously an old-fashioned codified (ossified?) system in transition, beset by the realities of the modern world such as live streaming and tweeting.

So why does H&M want in?

Well, partly because of that old Groucho Marx-ism, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”, and its converse: that any club that won’t have you is the one you really really want to join. H&M wants to join the fashion club.

When I asked why it was having the show, H&M said: “In the past we have done some spectacular events and fashion shows for our designer collaborations and we feel it is time to celebrate our own fashion. We chose Paris because it is one of the most important fashion cities in the world and we are proud to present our autumn/winter 2013 collection here.”

In other words, we did it for Lanvin – we deserve it too!

But again this confuses the issue. The whole reason those designer collaborations are such runaway hits is because they bring another high fashion dimension to H&M. If H&M is claiming the same dimension for itself, why buy the other stuff?

What’s more, how can it make a bigger hoo-ha about the upcoming designer collaborations, when it is already having a full-on fashion show and party in one of the most classic art museums in Paris? I mean, it really doesn’t get bigger than that.

The H&M show invite is, literally, the biggest, heaviest, black and gold invite of today. It makes Rocha’s and Dries Van Noten’s look like little piddly things, which may be an accurate depiction of the size of the H&M business compared with those businesses, but is not really fair in terms of aesthetic influence (although it also raises the question of how H&M, famously into sustainability, squares all the paper waste with its policies, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time).

It is worth pointing out that the show does start at 10pm, which is not insignificant. It both raises the high street to haute fashion level, and then takes it way out of the professional level to “party on” level, both moves that are fully in line with the Reality-TV-isation of fashion, which sees the whole thing as more public spectacle and entertainment than industry event. In this context, having the show is simply taking advantage of the Brave New World of fashion.

Or maybe it’s a sneaky way to snag more hard-to-get designer collaborations by showing them what it can do?

Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see the repercussions of this one.