On brand collaborations

What are brands getting when they collaborate with artists? In the strongest cases, it’s something they cannot simply produce in-house: authorship with cultural weight behind it, access to taste communities that sit beyond ordinary advertising, and objects or images that continue working after a ‘campaign window’ closes. On the other side of the case, the artist gains a wider field of circulation without dissolving into the brand’s voice. And yet another win: the public receives something with a degree of cultural charge

In this article, I want to outline a short historical map of eight collaborations that I feel are exemplary. Together they show how brands have functioned as tastemakers, collaborators, commissioners, publishers, and distributors.

A short history of the format

The term brand collaboration can sound like a contemporary invention, as if it emerged with streetwear and social media. Its deeper history runs much longer though. It began with advertising as a patronage system, moved through postwar corporate culture and the professionalisation of commissioning, and arrived in the present as a mature format with its own canon. The most enduring collaborations share one trait: they treat the brand as a medium – an apparatus with manufacturing capacity, logistics, retail architecture, and a trained audience. They also treat the artist as more than an image supplier, giving them room to remain legible as an author.

Early modernity already trained artists to think in public images. Lithographic posters, product labels, shopfront graphics, and illustrated advertisements created an economy where art lived in streets and newspapers as much as it lived in salons. By the time you reach the twentieth century, commissions for brands had become an arena where artists tested mass visibility. An early example sits with Campari. In 1932, Fortunato Depero, an Italian Futurist painter, writer, sculptor, and graphic designer, designed the Campari Soda bottle – an industrial object with an unmistakable sculptural silhouette, commissioned for mass production. The bottle’s form carries Futurism’s taste for dynamism and engineered modernity into the hand. It functions simultaneously as a piece of product design, a brand identifier, a sculptural object, and a clearly authored work.

The postwar period shifted the stakes. Corporations grew large enough to fund cultural programs, and art grew conceptually ambitious enough to treat patronage as material. Brand support often moved from one-off commissions into repeatable structures: corporate collections, foundations, publishing programs, and long-term partnerships with institutions. That structural shift set the terms for what collaboration could be: a commissioning ecology rather than a single product. By the late twentieth century, the collaboration became fully legible as a genre. You see it in recurring projects, in named programs, in the way the artist’s contribution is framed and archived. The brand increasingly behaves like a publisher, and the artist increasingly thinks like a systems designer.

What brands are actually acquiring

Across this history, four recurring ambitions keep returning.

• Cultural legitimacy with a longer horizon Brands use art to build credibility that outlives a campaign cycle. Some do it through institutions – foundations, museum partnerships, artist prizes, and long-term commissioning programs – because those structures signal seriousness over time.

• Access to taste communities Artists bring publics with them: collectors, readers, niche subcultures, design audiences, fashion audiences, local scenes, digitally native communities. These are groups brands rarely reach through advertising alone. A collaboration becomes a way of entering an existing cultural conversation rather than trying to manufacture one from scratch.

• Objects with an afterlife Collaboration turns the commodity into something closer to a multiple: limited runs, numbered series, controlled releases, documentation, and the secondary market’s familiar rituals of scarcity and provenance. The object keeps moving after the campaign ends. In the strongest cases, its cultural and financial value compounds over time rather than disappearing like media spend.

• A point of view under conditions of visual overload Artists offer a way to refresh a brand’s visual grammar without losing recognisability. The collaboration becomes a controlled injection of difference – new motifs, new materials, new forms – held within a stable identity system.

Eight collaborations worth returning to

A short historical map

1) Pirelli’s calendar (1964 – now)

Pirelli understood early that prestige alone would not carry a project; it needed authorship. First published in 1964 (shot by Robert Freeman in Majorca), the Pirelli Calendar quickly established a specific kind of cultural object: a photographic commission with controlled access, printed in limited numbers and circulated as a gift within a closed network. Over time, its value has been built through a sustained curatorial tactic: pairing the calendar with photographers whose names already function as cultural capital, then letting that authorship carry the project across decades.

The early years already signal this strategy: Brian Duffy (1965), Peter Knapp (1966), Harri Peccinotti (1968–69), Francis Giacobetti (1970–71), Sarah Moon (1972), and Hans Feurer (1974). After a pause (1975–83), the relaunch accelerated the calendar’s role as a high-profile commission platform, moving through figures such as Uwe Ommer (1984), Norman Parkinson (1985), Bert Stern (1986), Arthur Elgort (1990), Herb Ritts (1994, 1999), Richard Avedon (1995, 1997), Peter Lindbergh (1996, 2002, 2017), Annie Leibovitz (2000, 2016), Mario Testino (2001), Nick Knight (2004), Mert & Marcus (2006), Inez & Vinoodh (2007), Karl Lagerfeld (2011), Steve McCurry (2013), Steven Meisel (2015), Tim Walker (2018), Paolo Roversi (2020), Bryan Adams (2022), Emma Summerton (2023), Prince Gyasi (2024), Ethan James Green (2025), and Sølve Sundsbø (2026).

A telling example of making something extra special arrived with the 50th anniversary: in 2014, Pirelli released images shot by Helmut Newton in 1986 that had remained unpublished, treating its own archive as a reservoir of cultural value.

What still makes the calendar interesting today is its logic: there’s the element of scarcity and the concept of gifting, both carefully staged within a recurring edition with new ‘voices’ each time, making it a brand object that almost behaves like a private exhibition program in itself.

2) Calder’s airplane design for Braniff (1973)

Braniff International Airways commissioning Alexander Calder to paint a DC-8 jet in 1973 remains one of the clearest statements of the brand-as-canvas idea. I love how Braniff grasped something decisive here, where the infrastructure itself could become the artwork. The aircraft, titled Flying Colors, was designed to operate on routes between North and South America and effectively turned commercial aviation into a moving exhibition surface. The public response at the time was full of curiosity and enthusiasm. The aircraft attracted attention wherever it landed, with passengers and airport staff frequently gathering around it on the tarmac to photograph the plane before boarding.

The project grew out of Braniff’s broader attempt to reposition the airline through design and culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under the leadership of Braniff president Harding Lawrence and advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence, the company had already invested heavily in visual identity – from aircraft liveries designed by Alexander Girard to uniforms by Emilio Pucci. Inviting Calder into that environment pushed the strategy further, treating the airplane itself as a commissioned artwork rather than simply a branded vehicle.

The collaboration proved successful enough that Braniff later invited Calder to create a second painted aircraft in 1975, this time for a Boeing 727. Together the planes demonstrated how a corporate commission could transform industrial infrastructure into a platform for artistic authorship. They also showed how a brand can borrow an artist’s visual language without shrinking it, and quite literally uplifting it: Calder’s scale remained monumental (and even more so than before), only now it was seen at airports instead of museums.

3) BMW Art Cars (1975 – now)

Over the course of many years, BMW turned one spectacular gesture into institutional memory. I’m talking about the BMW Art Car project, which began in 1975 with Alexander Calder painting a BMW 3.0 CSL – commissioned by racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain. It was a foundational case because it anchors collaboration in performance: the artwork entered the world through an event (Le Mans), and the brand’s engineering spectacle became part of the work’s meaning.

From there, BMW developed the project as a sustained commission platform, moving through a roster that reads like a compact history of postwar image-making and its global expansions: Frank Stella (1976), Roy Lichtenstein (1977), Andy Warhol (1979), Ernst Fuchs (1982), Robert Rauschenberg (1986), Michael Jagamara Nelson (1989) and Ken Done (1989), followed by Matazo Kayama (1990) and César Manrique (1990), A.R. Penck (1991) and Esther Mahlangu (1991), Sandro Chia (1992), David Hockney (1995), Jenny Holzer (1999), Olafur Eliasson (2007), Jeff Koons (2010), John Baldessari (2016), Cao Fei (2017), and, most recently, Julie Mehretu (2024).

The series’ longevity matters as much as its glamour. A program that continues into the present – Mehretu’s 20th Art Car, unveiled in 2024 and developed in direct relation to endurance racing – shows what happens when collaboration becomes institutional tradition, maintained through repeated commissions rather than a single moment of publicity. That continuity is part of the work’s meaning now.

4) Fondation Cartier (1984 – now)

Cartier founding the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 1984 reveals a different structure of collaboration. Instead of commissioning a single product or campaign, the brand created a permanent institution dedicated to contemporary art. Over the decades, the foundation has developed a program known for giving artists unusual freedom of scale and experimentation. One widely cited example is Ron Mueck’s 2005 exhibition, which introduced the Australian sculptor’s hyperreal figures to a broader European public and later travelled internationally.

The foundation has also cultivated long-running relationships with specific artists. Hiroshi Sugimoto has collaborated with the institution repeatedly, including the 2005 exhibition History of History, which examined how museums construct historical narratives through display. Also worth noticing is the foundation’s readiness to support ambitious, less easily marketable exhibition formats – research-heavy projects, cross-disciplinary shows, and installations whose scale would be difficult to produce within a standard commercial gallery framework.

Through projects like these, the Fondation Cartier has operated less like a sponsorship initiative and more like a museum whose programming is quietly sustained by a luxury house. The brand’s involvement remains visible in the institution’s name, yet the artistic program unfolds through curatorial autonomy, research, and production budgets that enable ambitious projects. It remains one of the clearest examples of a brand choosing patronage as a long-term identity rather than a short-term image strategy and I feel Cartier deserves credit for moving beyond the campaign model altogether and building cultural infrastructure.

5) Absolut Warhol (1985)

In 1985, Andy Warhol became the first artist commissioned to create a portrait of the Absolut bottle, launching what turned into one of the most influential art–advertising partnerships of the late twentieth century. The campaign established a model that many brands later copied: contemporary art as an endorsement engine, with the artist’s aura carried through a reproducible image.

Warhol’s involvement also opened the door to a long-running commissioning program. Soon after, artists such as Keith Haring (1986) and Jean-Michel Basquiat joined the campaign, followed in the 1990s by figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, and Rosemarie Trockel. In later years, artists such as Damien Hirst also contributed works inspired by the bottle’s silhouette. Over time, Absolut commissioned more than 850 artworks by over 550 artists, turning a single advertising concept into a vast distributed archive of contemporary art.

What makes the campaign endure is the clarity of the device. The bottle remained stable; the artists kept changing. That simple format allowed Absolut to accumulate cultural prestige through repetition while giving artists a highly legible surface on which to project their own vocabulary.

6) Swatch Art Watches (1985 – now)

Swatch’s Art Specials show another path: the artist’s style translated onto an everyday object at a scale wide enough to create cultural saturation. From the mid-1980s onward, the brand began inviting artists to treat the wristwatch as a small exhibition surface. One of the earliest and most recognisable examples arrived in 1986, when Keith Haring designed a series of watches covered with his dancing figures and graphic line language. The watch became a portable artwork. The program continued through the following decades, gradually forming an informal archive of contemporary art on the wrist. Artists such as Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Alfred Hofkunst, Annie Leibovitz, Jean-Michel Folon, and later figures including Damien Hirst and Jeremy Scott all translated their visual language into Swatch’s small circular format.

Over time the initiative expanded beyond individual artists into collaborations with cultural institutions. Swatch began working directly with museums and their collections, treating the watch face as a site for translating canonical artworks into domestic scale. Through these partnerships, paintings and sculptures from major collections entered the format of a wearable multiple, with watches referencing works by René Magritte, Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, Sandro Botticelli, Johannes Vermeer, and Katsushika Hokusai appearing through collaborations with institutions such as MoMA, the Louvre, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, and the Gallerie degli Uffizi. In these cases, the brand effectively operates as a publisher, reinterpreting historical masterpieces through contemporary product design while connecting museum collections to new audiences.

Swatch remains important because it shows that scale and accessibility do not have to empty a collaboration of meaning. The watch became a genuinely public carrier of artistic identity, moving through everyday life rather than staying inside a specialist art context.

7) Hermès Éditeur (2008 – now)

Hermès deserves credit for treating craft itself as the site of collaboration. Launched in 2008, the program of Hermès Éditeur invites artists to reinterpret the Hermès scarf through limited editions that foreground technique and material translation. The inaugural project drew on the geometric language of Josef and Anni Albers, adapting their colour studies and textile thinking into silk compositions produced in carefully controlled editions. The approach established the central premise of the series: the scarf as a print surface with technical stakes, where colour registration, pigment density, and edge-to-edge composition become part of the artistic process.

The program has continued with artists such as Daniel Buren, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Julio Le Parc, Ugo Rondinone, and others whose work carries strong graphic or chromatic identities suited to the silk surface. Editions are typically produced in small runs and presented with documentation, positioning the scarves somewhere between a collectible print and a wearable artwork.

Beyond Hermès Éditeur, the house has cultivated a broader ecosystem of artistic collaboration, frequently commissioning artists and illustrators to intervene in its visual communication – from window displays and boutique installations to digital interfaces. Hermès also maintains a close relationship with contemporary art through its corporate foundation, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, established in 2008. Through programs such as artists’ residencies and exhibitions, the company supports artists working with craft traditions and material experimentation. These initiatives connect contemporary practice to the artisanal knowledge embedded within Hermès’ own workshops.

What makes Hermès especially persuasive in this field is that the collaboration never feels pasted on. Technique, surface, and material translation sit at the centre of the exchange, which is why the results often hold their weight over time.

8) Hyundai at Tate Modern (2015 – now)

Hyundai shows what brand patronage looks like when it funds public scale. Their long-term partnership with Tate Modern, launched in 2015, formalised a contemporary reality of museum production: large-scale commissions increasingly depend on corporate patronage. The Hyundai Commission supports the annual installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, one of the most visible exhibition spaces in contemporary art. Each year an artist receives the institutional infrastructure necessary to realise an ambitious project whose scale would be difficult to achieve elsewhere.

The inaugural Hyundai Commission was awarded to Abraham Cruzvillegas, whose installation Empty Lot filled the Turbine Hall with triangular soil beds planted with seeds sourced from across London. The 2017 commission went to SUPERFLEX, whose project One Two Three Swing! introduced a large orange playground structure composed of interconnected swings. The 2019 edition featured Kara Walker, whose monumental fountain Fons Americanus reinterpreted the language of imperial monuments through a fictional memorial that addressed the histories of slavery, colonialism, and transatlantic trade.

Across these projects, the Hyundai Commission demonstrates how corporate patronage can operate as cultural infrastructure. The brand’s support enables artists to work at an architectural scale, while the museum provides curatorial framing and public access. Each installation becomes a temporary landmark within Tate Modern’s program – an artwork experienced by millions of visitors and documented as part of the institution’s evolving history of large-scale commissions. It is one of the clearest contemporary examples of a brand choosing visibility through support (rather than through overt self-display, for example).

Looking ahead

Recent collaborations increasingly move into environments: AR overlays, live activations, experiential retail that behaves like a staged exhibition, and digital collectibles that function as membership objects. Louis Vuitton’s AR Kusama campaign, for instance, used digital polka dots across landmarks via Snap’s Landmarker lenses – an artwork experienced as a shared layer on public space.

At the same time, the last few years have shown how fragile platform-based collaborations can become. Nike’s acquisition of RTFKT in 2021 signalled corporate interest in digital collectibles, followed by a wind-down of the project by early 2025 and legal disputes from buyers. The episode reads like a stress test for the brand-as-platform model: community expectations, ownership rhetoric, and long-term stewardship now sit at the centre of what collaboration means in digital contexts.

From my perspective, the collaborations that keep their value are the ones where authorship survives translation. The brand contributes reach, fabrication, institutional weight, and/or technical infrastructure, and the artist contributes a live visual language and a point of view the brand does not already possess. That, for me, is the real measure: a strong collaboration should leave behind more than visibility.