After last year’s Hanes x Karla T-shirt line, celebrity stylist Karla Welch is bringing us another collaboration with a classic American basics brand: Levi’s. With the brand’s pseudo-holiday, “501 Day,” coming up on May 20, she reinvented its iconic 501 style as well as several others, including a reversible Sherpa jacket, a boiler suit, a pleated jean, a western shirt and a trucker jacket. With growing frequency, brands are inking collaboration deals not with celebrities or “It” girls, but with celebrity stylists. With the rise of social media, stylists (and other members of celebrity glam teams) are able to raise their own profiles, and many are leveraging that influence with various design deals. For brands, these stylists can bring a lot to the table: an understanding of trends and what’s missing from the market, an understanding of what men and women want to wear, and, of course, a built-in roster of celebrities who will likely wear whatever is born out of the collaboration.
