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On Thursday at 8:07 p.m. Dubai time, in a desert camp 40 kilometres outside the city, 45 people with a combined social media profile of more than 300 hundred million followers raised their glasses and howled their approval at a large LED display.
Amongst them were TikTok superstar Khaby Lame, supermodel Taylor Hill, and tennis sensation Matteo Berrettini; along with the rest of the group, they were cheering each other as they appeared on the screen. Accompanied by around 250 guests, they were here to witness the first showing of a new filmed Boss see-now-buy-now presentation of its Spring/Summer 2022 collection, in which they were all cast. Over the last two days they had worked from sunset to sunrise in another desert location, filming variations of their group walk, over and over again; now at last they were seeing the result. When Lame appeared on screen for the first time, mooching across the sand in a white jersey suit, the cheers were loudest of all.
Hugo Boss CEO Daniel Grieder is leading a full makeover of the company, ranging from marketing to design. In brief? Boss is for millennials, Hugo for Gen Z.
It was the culmination of a 19-day, concept-to-production activation, the latest stage of Hugo Boss’s declared intention to go from a €2.8 billion revenue company (as per 2021 figures) to a €4 billion revenue company within five years. To get there, the company recently underwent a dramatic rebrand, splitting itself into two divisions, Hugo and Boss, which will target Gen Z and millennial audiences, respectively. Hugo Boss also intends to propel itself into the top 100 of Interbrand’s global brands list (where it currently languishes outside the top 500), said Miah Sullivan, senior VP of global marketing and brand communications.
This strategy, internally called “Claim 5”, is spearheaded by Boss’s newly installed CEO Daniel Grieder, who recently told Vogue Business that Hugo Boss had lost its relevance in fashion, but he planned to reclaim it.
Last night, Grieder was in New York, planning ahead. On the ground in Dubai was the ball-of-energy Sullivan, a former exec at Furla and St John Knits, and longstanding chief brand officer Ingo Wilts, whose collections for Hugo Boss Vogue has long reviewed. Vogue Business was invited to join them to observe from behind-the-scenes the development and execution of a new template for the fashion show that Boss is confident will allow it to reach its lofty goals.
The film we were watching — and which went “live” online at 3pm CET today across Instagram, TikTok, Weibo, YouTube and other channels — cost up to €2 million to execute, Sullivan indicated with careful non-precision. Chasing social media eyeballs while New York Fashion Week is in full-swing is no easy feat. Yet, Sullivan was upbeat: “I can also tell you that within 48 hours of the show going live we will generate five times the cost of the event in media value alone — that is for certain,” she said. The reason for her confidence? The collective creativity, diversity and reach of that carefully assembled cast.
“Every post is worth more than a Super Bowl ad”
However carefully planned, every production encounters hiccups. For Boss this week, that included the United Arab Emirates’ prudent ban on recreational drone flights following recent deadly drone-delivered attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen against Abu Dhabi. This obliged Boss’ invited influencers, celebrities and models to produce above-shots for the social media content they created independently around the show via the old-fashioned means of a long pole attached to a camera.
The influencers, many of them walking in a fashion show format for the first time, included the Hadban Twins, the The Tripletsss, Zainab Aleqabi, Nic Kaufmann, Sundy Jules, Young Emperors, Wisdom Kaye and Younes Zarou. Alongside them was a respectably fabulous cast of celebrities from both entertainment and sport including Teyana Taylor, Lucien Leon Laviscount, Berrettini (about whom Netflix was filming a documentary on the Boss set), Ashley Park and Michele Morrone. Oh yes, and there were the models: these included Cindy Bruna, Didi Stone, Candice Swanepoel, Stella Maxwell, Dilone, Jordan Barrett and Alton Mason.
Of all of these, however, the undisputed alphas were Madeline Stuart and Khaby Lame. Stuart, 25, is the only regularly working model with Downs Syndrome. She formed a close working friendship with model Alpha Dia as they completed their repetitions of the three set-ups in the desert.
Lame meanwhile, was arguably the sun around which every other personality on the Boss stage orbited. With 131.7 million followers, the 20 year old Italian has become the world’s second most-followed TikToker thanks to his Chaplin-esque physical comedy skits that parody the internet’s life-hack ridiculousness with a bemused shrug (he also has 69 million Instagram followers). Lame was recruited exclusively to Boss by Sullivan after she observed his impact when cast in this year’s Boss hoodie launch. This launch she said “generated 6.6 billion impressions and 307 million social media engagements within six days”. The run of 60,000 hoodies sold out. However, what stood out most was the amount of engagement fired by Lame: his posts typically generated more than a half billion impressions. When he linked from his Instagram Reels to a post on Boss’s own Instagram it received over 10 million views, which the brand didn’t pay to boost or promote, said Sullivan. “We had a huge response from him. Every post is worth more than a Super Bowl ad in terms of impressions.”
Lame himself, as she said this, was nearby smoking a hookah with his minder Momo and affably taking selfies with anyone who approached him, cool as a cucumber.
“Influencers can be easier to work with”
The film at the centrepiece of this brand activation is directed by Etienne Russo. The maverick Italian is a stalwart of the fashion system thanks to his show productions for special events company Villa Eugénie, however, he said that during the pandemic he has pivoted towards film fashion direction.
“This a natural evolution,” he said on Wednesday morning while checking his takes. Russo, who had been sleeping in the desert for the last three nights in order to speed up production, denied any suggestion that it might be more challenging to work with celebrities and TikTokers than models. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say it but in the fashion system there are many people who think they are stars and do not have to work so hard,” he explained. “Whereas dancers, athletes, actors, and these young guys the influencers can be easier to work with, because they understand that you have to go again and again to make something perfect.”
The film that Russo has shaped is the core of a wider universe of brand amplification, which begins today with that big bang, the release of the film, and will continue with the ensuing aftershock content released on social media by the cast members. According to Sullivan, who is refreshingly candid about her strategy: “This is a giant social media stunt. This is essentially what we are doing here: we start each project with the goal to break the internet.”
Just before the desert reveal of the Russo-directed film that will be released digitally today I shared a mineral water with one of its most unlikely models, the American fashion designer Spencer Phipps. He said: “The casting here has been so… cross-platform. It’s a new type of group environment to be in especially for someone like me who is so entrenched in the fashion world. But, I think it shows that they have rethought the appeal of Boss the brand: they want Boss to be global, to be modern, and to be for everyone and anyone who wants to share that point of view. It sounds simple, yet it’s very smart.”
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