Continuing the idea of accessible luxury, Hennes & Mauritz has announced that its next guest designer will be Matthew Williamson. Williamson follows in the footsteps of Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Viktor & Rolf and Comme des Garçons in creating capsule collections for the mass-market brand.
Williamson will begin with an exclusive women’s fashion range at selected stores on April 23, then continuing with men’s and women’s pieces for summer available from mid-May, in all H&M stores worldwide. In an exclusive for H&M, Williamson will début his first-ever menswear pieces.
‘It is an incredible opportunity to be working with H&M, creating a “Matthew Williamson for H&M” capsule collection,’ said the designer in a release. ‘I love the fact that H&M have created a new phenomenon in fashion through the pioneering concept of collaborating with high-end designers to create one-off limited-edition capsule collections. I am thrilled that my creations for H&M will be accessible to and hopefully enjoyed by so many people around the world.’
Creative adviser Margareta van den Bosch says, ‘Matthew has such a good eye and a way for working with prints that he mixes up in a new way. When he combines these things, you get a very contemporary London look. It’s for people who want to look special, but his clothes can also be worn in a nonchalant way—you can really play around with them. He is fantastic with piling on colour—it’s a very stylish collaboration for H&M, and very much in line with the way we’re thinking about fashion for spring–summer.’
Williamson burst onto the London fashion scene in 1997, with a colour-drenched collection modelled by Kate Moss, Helena Christensen and Jade Jagger. His clothes are worn regularly by celebrities such as Sienna Miller, Keira Knightley, Kate Hudson and Gwyneth Paltrow, and last year he was honoured with an exhibition on his first decade at the Design Museum in London.