Louis Vuitton's Menswear Director is Teaming up with NikeLab

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NikeLab has tapped Louis Vuitton’s menswear artistic director, Kim Jones, for its latest designer capsule collection. Much like Balmain's Olivier Rousteing, who recently fronted a collaboration with Nike, Jones announced the news by way of his personal Instagram account on Monday. The collection, which is slated to drop next month, is the second from a creative director of an LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned brand; Givenchy's creative director, Riccardo Tisci, announced that he was teaming up with the Portland-based sportswear giant last year.

Given the increasingly frequent nature of these collabs, it appears that the contracts that come hand-in-hand with the creative director positions at luxury conglomerate-owned houses, such as those that fall under the umbrella of LVMH and Kering, for instance, may not be as limiting as one might otherwise expect.

Looking beyond the NikeLab capsules for a moment, Raf Simons, the former creative director of Christian Dior, has an ongoing arrangement with adidas. This scenario is varies a bit from the Tisci/Jones ones, though, as it was formed prior to Simons taking the helm of Dior. Another distinguishing factor: Simons maintained (and continues to maintain) an eponymous label during his Dior tenure and it is in connection with that brand that the ongoing Adidas collaboration is associated, not Dior. Unlike Simons, however, neither Tisci nor Jones currently have their own labels (Note: Jones did operate an eponymous label upon his graduation from Central Saint Martins in the early 2000’s but closed up shop to take on the role at Dunhill in 2008), and as such, the NikeLab collections are categorized as personal projects, not technically associated with any brand of their own or of their employers. (More about that in a minute).

Such collabs are not limited to LVMH-owned brands, though. While employed by Balenciaga (a Kering-owned label), Alexander Wang was able to team up with Swedish fast fashion giant H&M for a collaboration, in connection with his eponymous label, that is. And Stella McCartney, whose brand is owned by Kering, maintains a longstanding partnership with adidas.

Are you skeptical about just how separate these outside collections are from the houses that employ these big name designers, such as Tisci and Jones? You should be. Thus far, most publications (this one included) have identified such designers largely by the houses that employ them. Given the widespread visibility of modern creative directors, Olivier Rousteing, for example, is not just Olivier Rousteing. He is Balmain's creative director, and as a result, headlines about his Nike collection read as follows: "Balmain's Olivier Rousteing Is Collaborating With Nike", "Olivier Rousteing Is Releasing a Nike Collab, and It Looks Very Balmain", and "NikeLab’s Collection with Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing Is Already on eBay", etc. The same goes for Tisci's ongoing Nike collection and its headlines, which basically follow a similar format: "A First Look at Givenchy Designer Riccardo Tisci's NikeLab Apparel."

In this way, are such individual creative director collaborations all that different from ones in which an actual brand, itself, teams up with another (think: Marni for H&M or Missoni for Target)? In actuality, the technical differences are vast but at the same time, the gamut of potential risks remains for a design house, whether it is lending its name or its creative director. With this in mind, there is much more at stake for a design house in light of such collabs than the individual designer (at the end of the day, the designer brand name does, in fact, come into play, even if only in terms of press). As such, it is interesting that high fashion houses, like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, sign off on such projects (directly or indirectly). However, given the recent announcement of the impending Kenzo (an LVMH-owned brand) collaboration with H&M, maybe we should not be all that surprised by the conglomerate's seemingly laissez-faire attitude when it comes to partnerships.

Most interestingly, though, is that neither Givenchy nor Louis Vuitton has a clause in their directors' contracts prohibiting them from taking on such side projects (especially assuming that their salaries would likely allow for it); as a result, permitting them to team up with other brands and bring their employers' names right along with them.See more at:sexy formal dresses