What Does It Mean When Celebrity Style Can Be Bought?
A few months ago, Kendall Jenner ditched her uniform of impeccably tailored trousers and T-shirts and began wearing a lot of Bottega Veneta. One might even call it a suspicious amount of Bottega Veneta. An acolyte of pared-down, so-called stealth-wealth brands like The Row, Khaite, and Phoebe Philo, Jenner’s pivot toward more conspicuous luxury raised some eyebrows.
Lo and behold, earlier this month, the brand unveiled a new guerrilla marketing campaign: their logo plastered on top of paparazzi snaps of Jenner and A$AP Rocky going about their lives in head-to-toe Bottega. Undeniably cheeky, the Italian house leaned into the “Stars—They Aren’t Just Like Us” of it all. See Jenner pumping gas wearing a dramatic A-line dress with blue-and-yellow striped boots with a $10K price tag and A$AP Rocky going for a jog in luxury athleisure.
The strategy—sending stylish stars into the streets to create organic paparazzi pH๏τos and press—was savvy. Fashion publications (including this one), in addition to social media chatter, did the heavy lifting for the brand. “Bottega Veneta doesn’t have an Instagram account—and it doesn’t need one,” my colleague Madeleine Schulz noted in Vogue Business. Why, after all, pay for traditional advertising when you can get it for free?
While the use of so-called plan-dids for the campaign has earned largely positive feedback for the brand, the undeniably savvy marketing initiative toes a thin line. When everything around us is commercialized, style is one of the few things that feels…personal. Turning one of the few remaining vestiges of character into a commodity could easily sow seeds of distrust among consumers.
Bottega’s choice to run a campaign like this was especially curious given creative director Matthieu Blazy’s design philosophy. Speaking about the resort 2024 collection—which Jenner and A$AP Rocky both wore throughout the campaign—he said: “It’s not about the total look…. With the team, we talked a lot about what makes individuals special, the pieces they wear and the pieces that tell a story—the pieces, sometimes, that are a bit off, something that feels very personal, what makes you different from others.”
That’s not to suggest that the Bottega campaign looks weren’t good; they were, and that’s one of the reasons they gained so much coverage. But it threatens to undermine Blazy’s (undoubtedly sincere) message about individuality when the brand he leads is turning celebrities into walking billboards, dressed in looks styled identically to the models in the house-approved pH๏τographs. Casting the likes of Kendall Jenner and A$AP Rocky—both known for their sharp fashion senses—as campaign stars could have left boundless room for creativity. Why not allow them to incorporate pieces into their everyday wear? (Admittedly, this is an unlikely concession for an ad campaign.)
