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Time was, fashion sponsorship entailed nothing more imaginative than a corporate giant slapping its rarely very stylish branding at the back of a young designer's runway for all to see, if not exactly marvel over.
While this may indeed have hammered any commercial message home, it did so very much at the designer's expense. Even the most creative of minds would find it hard to overcome the looming presence of the Lloyds Bank logo, say, threatening to overwhelm their clothes.
That was then. These days, fashion sponsorship is a rather more sophisticated - not to say competitive - affair. This is not surprising. Now that fashion has hit the mainstream, with even the more heavyweight media reporting on shows daily, the amount of column inches and/or airtime a sponsor may receive by associating itself with the right designer may be worth its weight in gold.
As for the designers, even in the British fashion capital, where shows are famously modest by international standards, a catwalk presentation on the official schedule is likely to cost upwards of pounds 25,000 when you take into account the venue, lighting, soundtrack, models, hair and make- up, as well as the clothes themselves.
Small wonder then that, with only weeks to go before the next round of women's ready-to-wear collections in this country, anyone who hasn't secured the financial backing vital to support the expensive business of showing may find that the money has been snapped up. Other, more motivated, designers have been keen both to nurture long-term relationships with their sponsors and to develop ever more lateral ways to give them something in return for their money.
To this end, our designers have by now committed to everything from consulting on the art direction of corporate sponsors' ad campaigns (Julien Macdonald/Max Factor) and designing special limited edition credit cards (Alexander McQueen/American Express) to putting their name to capsule collections for sale in high street stores (Hussein Chalayan/Top Shop).
"Straight after one season finishes, we start thinking about sponsorship for the next," says Macdonald, whose principle sponsor for autumn/winter was Max Factor. He not only art-directed the make- up manufacturer's spring colours campaign, but helped to decide on the colours of the lipsticks themselves.
"There are a lot of...